“No, thank you; you’re very kind.”

He looked back once or twice at her blue-clad figure standing very still.  He had left her against a little oasis of piled-up empty milk-cans, far down the platform where a few civilians in similar case were scattered.  The trainway was empty as yet.  In the grey immensity of the station and the turmoil of its noise, she felt neither lonely nor conscious of others waiting; too absorbed in the one thought of seeing him and touching him again.  The empty train began backing in, stopped, and telescoped with a series of little clattering bangs, backed on again, and subsided to rest.  Noel turned her eyes towards the station arch ways.  Already she felt tremulous, as though the regiment were sending before it the vibration of its march.

She had not as yet seen a troop-train start, and vague images of brave array, of a flag fluttering, and the stir of drums, beset her.  Suddenly she saw a brown swirling mass down there at the very edge, out of which a thin brown trickle emerged towards her; no sound of music, no waved flag.  She had a longing to rush down to the barrier, but remembering the words of the porter, stayed where she was, with her hands tightly squeezed together.  The trickle became a stream, a flood, the head of which began to reach her.  With a turbulence of voices, sunburnt men, burdened up to the nose, passed, with rifles jutting at all angles; she strained her eyes, staring into that stream as one might into a walking wood, to isolate a single tree.  Her head reeled with the strain of it, and the effort to catch his voice among the hubbub of all those cheery, common, happy-go-lucky sounds.  Some who saw her clucked their tongues, some went by silent, others seemed to scan her as though she might be what they were looking for.  And ever the stream and the hubbub melted into the train, and yet came pouring on.  And still she waited motionless, with an awful fear.  How could he ever find her, or she him?  Then she saw that others of those waiting had found their men.  And the longing to rush up and down the platform almost overcame her; but still she waited.  And suddenly she saw him with two other officer boys, close to the carriages, coming slowly down towards her.  She stood with her eyes fixed on his face; they passed, and she nearly cried out.  Then he turned, broke away from the other two, and came straight to her.  He had seen her before she had seen him.  He was very flushed, had a little fixed frown between his blue eyes and a set jaw.  They stood looking at each other, their hands hard gripped; all the emotion of last night welling up within them, so that to speak would have been to break down.  The milk-cans formed a kind of shelter, and they stood so close together that none could see their faces.  Noel was the first to master her power of speech; her words came out, dainty as ever, through trembling lips: 

“Write to me as much as ever you can, Cyril.  I’m going to be a nurse at once.  And the first leave you get, I shall come to you—­don’t forget.”