She passed her hand over her forehead, shading her face.  It shamed her that he was going to be interested in what she told him and not at all in her manner of telling it.  “I’ve told you.  She was full of plans about us all going up to-morrow.  To a theatre.  And she sent for the cook and talked to her about saucepans.”

“What saucepans?”

“Aluminium saucepans.”

“But what about them?”

She laughed aloud in the face of his displeasure.  An image of the temple in the wood mocked her mind’s eye.  Instead of standing in one of the narrow chambers of shadow that lay behind its pillars with his lips on hers, she was being cross-examined about saucepans.  “She reckoned to get them in the forenoon before we went to the theatre.”

For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort:  “She really was all right, Ellen?”

“Cross my heart, Richard, she was that.”

Their hands stole into one another’s; from the warm, fluttering pressure of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring things about her.  If everything had not happened as she wished, it was not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it had not endured long enough.  There was a golden age ahead.  She leaned towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression.  His face, which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine.  “Yes, she will most probably be up there ... at his tomb....”

Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably:  “Mummie!  Mummie!” He turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door.  “Here, Roger, let’s go now.”  The glance he shot backwards into the room was so preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for Poppy.  “Well, I don’t expect we’ll be long....”

They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than their tall, striding selves.  There seemed to be some mishap at the gate into the orchard.  Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but he was very brave.  The two women stood at the window and watched him hop about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and hatred.  Then again the silver garden was empty.

Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an extravagant bitterness:  “Well, that’s that.  He knows as well as I do that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven.”

“No doubt Mr. Yaverland’ll go round in the morning and explain the exceptional circumstances,” murmured Ellen.