He was manoeuvred at last from the room.  Harry Luttrell and Joan Whitworth were left standing opposite to one another in the room.

“Joan,” Harry Luttrell said, “in ten days I go back to France.”

With a queer little stumble and her hands fluttering out she went towards him blinded by a rush of tears.

CHAPTER XXXII

“BUT STILL A RUBY KINDLES IN THE VINE”

Between the North and South Downs in the east of Sussex lies a wide tract of pleasant homely country which, during certain months of those years, was subject to a strange phenomenon.  Listen on a still day when the clouds were low, or at night when the birds were all asleep, and you heard a faint, soft thud, so very faint that it was rather a convulsion of the air than an actual sound.  Fancy might paint it as the tap of an enormous muffled drum beaten at a giant’s funeral leagues and leagues away.  It was not the roll of thunder.  There was no crash, however distant, along the sky.  It was just the one soft impact with a suggestion of earth-wide portentous force; and an interval followed; and the blurred sound again.  The dwellers in those parts, who had sons and husbands at the war, made up no fancies to explain it.  They listened with a sinking of the heart; for what they heard was the roar of the British guns at Ypres.

Into this country Martin Hillyard drove a small motor-car on a day of October two years afterwards.  Until this week he had not set foot in his country of the soft grey skies since he had left Rackham Park.  He had hurried down to Rackham as soon as he had reported to his Chief, but not with the high anticipation of old days.  In what spirit would he find his friends?  How would Joan meet him?  For sorrow had marked her cross upon the door of that house as upon so many others in the land.

Martin had arrived before luncheon.

“Joan is hunting to-day,” said Millie, “on the other side of the county.  She will catch a train back.”

“I can fetch her,” Hillyard returned.  “She is well?”

“Yes.  She was overworked and ordered a rest.  She has been with us a fortnight and is better.  She was very grateful for your letters.  She sent you a telegram because she could not bear to write.”

Martin had understood that.  He had had little news of her during the two years—­a few lines about Harry in the crowded obituaries of the newspapers after the attack in 1917 on the Messines Ridge, where he met his death, and six months afterwards the announcement that a son was born.

“Joan’s distress was terrible,” said Millie.  “At first she refused to believe that Harry was killed.  He was reported as ‘missing’ for weeks; and during those weeks Joan, with a confident face—­whatever failings of the heart beset her during the night vigils none ever knew—­daily sought for news of him at the Red Cross office at Devonshire House.  There had been the usual rumours.  One officer in one prison camp had heard of Harry Luttrell in another.  A sergeant had seen him wounded, not mortally.  A bullet had struck him in the foot.  Joan lived upon these rumours.  Finally proof came—­proof irrefutable.