“God make it easy!” she said.

A bullet struck a wheel beside her, and with a ricochet passed through the flesh of her forearm.  A strange look came into her eyes, suffusing them.  Was her work done also?  Was she here to find the solution of all her own problems—­like Stafford—­like Stafford?  Stooping, she reverently kissed the bloodless cheek.  A kind of exaltation possessed her.  There was no fear at all.  She had a feeling that he would need her on the journey he was about to take, and there was no one else who could help him now.  Who else was there beside herself—­and Jigger?

Where was Jigger?  What had become of Jigger?  He would surely have been with Stafford if he had not been hurt or killed.  It was not like Jigger to be absent when Stafford needed him.

She looked out from under the gun, as though expecting to find him coming—­to see him somewhere on this stricken plain.  As she did so she saw the young surgeon, who had stayed to help the wounded gunner, stumbling and lurching towards the gun, hands clasping his side, and head thrust forward in an attitude of tense expectation, as though there was a goal which must be reached.

An instant later she was outside hastening towards him.  A bullet spat at her feet, another cut the skirt of her dress, but all she saw was the shambling figure of the man who, but a few minutes before, was so flexible and alert with life, eager to relieve the wounds of those who had fallen.  Now he also was in dire need.

She had almost reached him when, with a stiff jerk sideways and an angular artion of the figure, he came to the ground like a log, ungainly and rigid.

“They got me!  I’m hit—­twice,” he said, with grey lips; with eyes that stared at her and through her to something beyond; but he spoke in an abrupt, professional, commonplace tone.  “Shrapnel and mauler,” he added, his hands protecting the place where the shrapnel had found him.  His staring blue eyes took on a dull cloud, and his whole figure seemed to sink and shrink away.  As though realizing and resisting, if not resenting this dissolution of his forces, his voice rang out querulously, and his head made dogmatic emphasis.

“They oughtn’t to have done it,” the petulant voice insisted.  “I wasn’t fighting.”  Suddenly the voice trailed away, and all emphasis, accent, and articulation passed from the sentient figure.  Yet his lips moved once again.  “Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace—­first floor,” he said mechanically, and said no more.

As mechanically as he had spoken, Al’mah repeated the last words.  “Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace, first floor,” she said slowly.

They were chambers next to those where Adrian Fellowes had lived and died.  She shuddered.

“So he was not married,” she said reflectively, as she left the lifeless body and went back to the gun where Stafford lay.

Her arm through which the bullet had passed was painful, but she took no heed of it.  Why should she?  Hundreds, maybe thousands, were being killed off there in the hills.  She saw nothing except the debris of Ian Stafford’s life drifting out to the shoreless sea.