“Good-bye, my little wife!  Don’t fret.  Goodbye!  I must go.  God bless you, Noel!”

“I love you.”

They looked at each other, just another moment, then she took her hands from his and stood back in the shadow of the milk-cans, rigid, following him with her eyes till he was lost in the train.

Every carriage window was full of those brown figures and red-brown faces, hands were waving vaguely, voices calling vaguely, here and there one cheered; someone leaning far out started to sing:  “If auld acquaintance—­” But Noel stood quite still in the shadow of the milk-cans, her lips drawn in, her hands hard clenched in front of her; and young Morland at his window gazed back at her.

2

How she came to be sitting in Trafalgar Square she did not know.  Tears had formed a mist between her and all that seething, summer-evening crowd.  Her eyes mechanically followed the wandering search-lights, those new milky ways, quartering the heavens and leading nowhere.  All was wonderfully beautiful, the sky a deep dark blue, the moonlight whitening the spire of St. Martin’s, and everywhere endowing the great blacked-out buildings with dream-life.  Even the lions had come to life, and stared out over this moonlit desert of little human figures too small to be worth the stretching out of a paw.  She sat there, aching dreadfully, as if the longing of every bereaved heart in all the town had settled in her.  She felt it tonight a thousand times worse; for last night she had been drugged on the new sensation of love triumphantly fulfilled.  Now she felt as if life had placed her in the corner of a huge silent room, blown out the flame of joy, and locked the door.  A little dry sob came from her.  The hay-fields and Cyril, with shirt unbuttoned at the neck, pitching hay and gazing at her while she dabbled her fork in the thin leavings.  The bright river, and their boat grounded on the shallows, and the swallows flitting over them.  And that long dance, with the feel of his hand between her shoulder-blades!  Memories so sweet and sharp that she almost cried out.  She saw again their dark grassy courtyard in the Abbey, and the white owl flying over them.  The white owl!  Flying there again to-night, with no lovers on the grass below!  She could only picture Cyril now as a brown atom in that swirling brown flood of men, flowing to a huge brown sea.  Those cruel minutes on the platform, when she had searched and searched the walking wood for her, one tree, seemed to have burned themselves into her eyes.  Cyril was lost, she could not single him out, all blurred among those thousand other shapes.  And suddenly she thought:  ’And I—­I’m lost to him; he’s never seen me at home, never seen me in London; he won’t be able to imagine me.  It’s all in the past, only the past—­for both of us.  Is there anybody so unhappy?’ And the town’s voices-wheels, and passing feet, whistles, talk, laughter—­seemed to answer callously:  ‘Not one.’  She looked at her wrist-watch; like his, it had luminous hands:  ‘Half-past ten’ was greenishly imprinted there.  She got up in dismay.  They would think she was lost, or run over, or something silly!  She could not find an empty taxi, and began to walk, uncertain of her way at night.  At last she stopped a policeman, and said: