“Sir W. Blint, Bart.”

Below this he cut a deep, white oblong in the bark, and with a coal from the burned airplane he wrote: 

“This is the beginning, not the end.  This Englishman still carries on!”

He stood at salute for a full minute.  Then turned, dropped to his knees, and began another thorough search among the debris and dead leaves.

“Hello, Yellow-hair!”

She had been watching his approach from where she was seated balanced on the stream’s edge, with both legs in the water to the knees.

He came up and dropped down beside her on the moss.

“A dead airman in Les Errues,” he said quietly, “a Britisher.  I put away what remained of him.  The Huns may dig him up:  some animals do such things.”

“Where did you find him, Kay?” she asked quietly.

“A quarter of a mile down-stream.  He lay on the west slope.  He had fallen clear, but there was not much left of his machine.”

“How long has he lain there in this forest?”

“A year—­to judge.  Also the last entry in his diary bears this out.  They got him through the head, and his belt gave way or was not fastened.—­Anyway he came down stone dead and quite clear of his machine.  His name was Blint—­Sir W. Blint, Bart....  Lie back on the moss and let your bruised feet hang in the pool....  Here—­this way —­rest that yellow head of yours against my knees. ...  Are you snug?”

“Yes.”

“Hold out your hands.  These were his trinkets.”

The girl cupped her hands to receive the rings, watch, the gold whistle in its little gem-set chains, and the sleigh-bell on its bracelet.

She examined them one by one in silence while McKay ran through the pages of the notebook—­discoloured pages all warped and stained in their leather binding but written in pencil with print-like distinction.

“Sir W. Blint,” murmured McKay, still busy with the notebook.  “Can’t find what W. stood for.”

“That’s all there is—­just his name and military rank as an aviator:  I left the disk where it hung.”

The girl placed the trinkets on the moss beside her and looked up into McKay’s face.

Both knew they were thinking of the same thing.  They wore no disks.  Would anybody do for them what McKay had done for the late Sir W. Blint?

McKay bent a little closer over her and looked down into her face.  That any living creature should touch this woman in death seemed to him almost more terrible than her dying.  It was terror of that which sometimes haunted him; no other form of fear.

What she read in his eyes is not clear—­was not quite clear to her, perhaps.  She said under her breath: 

“You must not fear for me, Kay....  Nothing can really touch me now.”

He did not understand what she meant by this immunity—­gathering some vague idea that she had spoken in the spiritual sense.  And he was only partly right.  For when a girl is beginning to give her soul to a man, the process is not wholly spiritual.