to those arms or these?  Must she, because of it, always need protection?  Standing there in the dark it was almost as if they had come up behind her, with their pleadings; and a shiver ran down her back.  She longed to turn on them, and cry out:  “Go away; oh; go away!  I don’t want either of you; I just want to be left alone!” Then something, a moth perhaps, touched her neck.  She gasped and shook herself.  How silly!

She heard the back door round the corner of the house opening; a man’s low voice down in the dark said: 

“Who’s the young lady that comes out in the fields?”

Another voice—­one of the maids—­answered: 

“The Missis’s sister.”

“They say she’s got a baby.”

“Never you mind what she’s got.”

Noel heard the man’s laugh.  It seemed to her the most odious laugh she had ever heard.  She thought swiftly and absurdly:  ’I’ll get away from all this.’  The window was only a few feet up.  She got out on to the ledge, let herself down, and dropped.  There was a flower-bed below, quite soft, with a scent of geranium-leaves and earth.  She brushed herself, and went tiptoeing across the gravel and the little front lawn, to the gate.  The house was quite dark, quite silent.  She walked on, down the road.  ‘Jolly!’ she thought.  ’Night after night we sleep, and never see the nights:  sleep until we’re called, and never see anything.  If they want to catch me they’ll have to run.’  And she began running down the road in her evening frock and shoes, with nothing on her head.  She stopped after going perhaps three hundred yards, by the edge of the wood.  It was splendidly dark in there, and she groped her way from trunk to trunk, with a delicious, half-scared sense of adventure and novelty.  She stopped at last by a thin trunk whose bark glimmered faintly.  She felt it with her cheek, quite smooth—­a birch tree; and, with her arms round it, she stood perfectly still.  Wonderfully, magically silent, fresh and sweet-scented and dark!  The little tree trembled suddenly within her arms, and she heard the low distant rumble, to which she had grown so accustomed—­the guns, always at work, killing—­killing men and killing trees, little trees perhaps like this within her arms, little trembling trees!  Out there, in this dark night, there would not be a single unscarred tree like this smooth quivering thing, no fields of corn, not even a bush or a blade of grass, no leaves to rustle and smell sweet, not a bird, no little soft-footed night beasts, except the rats; and she shuddered, thinking of the Belgian soldier-painter.  Holding the tree tight, she squeezed its smooth body against her.  A rush of the same helpless, hopeless revolt and sorrow overtook her, which had wrung from her that passionate little outburst to her father, the night before he went away.  Killed, torn, and bruised; burned, and killed, like Cyril!  All the young things, like this little tree.