, and the brown moustache is ominously straight and curveless.
"Tell him, if he recovers consciousness, that I thought it best to send
for her. Chagrave has gone with a couple of the men. It's a desperate
night for a woman to be out in, but they took an Ambulance sling-chair
with them. They'll wrap her in tarpaulins, and carry her in that."

He nods and goes up on the lookout with a night-glass, and the wearied
officer he relieves comes down. As he has said, it is a desperate night of
driving sleet and swirling blackness, illuminated only with the malignant
coruscations of lyddite bursting-charges. But the tempest without is
nothing to the tempest that rages in the soul of the quiet man in sodden
khaki who watches by the dying.

She has been sent for.... She is coming.... To kneel by the low cot and
weep over him who lies there; kiss the tortured lips and the beautiful dim
eyes, and hold the unwounded head upon her breast.... How shall Saxham
bear it without crying out to tell her? He clenches his hands, and sets
his strong jaw, and the sweat breaks out upon his broad, pale forehead.
The man upon the bed, mentally clear, though incapable of coherent speech,
is now listening to comments that shall ere long be made by living men
upon one who very soon shall be numbered with the dead.

"Well, well, don't be hard on the poor beggar!" he hears them saying.
"Give the devil his due: not a bad chap--take him all round. Got carried
away and lost his head. She's as lovely as they make 'em, and he ...
always a fool where a pretty woman was concerned--poor old Toby!"

He pleads unconsciously, with his most merciless judge, in his utter
incapacity to plead at all....

And so the time goes by. There has been coming and going in the place
outside. The guard has relieved the double sentries, the official lamp
burns redly under the little penthouse. A reconnoitring-patrol ride out,
the horses' hoofs sounding hollow on the earth-covered boards of the
sloping way. The business of War goes on in its accustomed grooves, and
the business of Life will soon be over for Beauvayse. Yet she has not
come. And Saxham looks at his watch.

Nine o'clock. He has not eaten since early morning. He is wet to the skin
and stiff with long sitting. But when the savoury odours of hot horse-soup
and hot bean-coffee, accompanied by the clinking of crockery and tin
pannikins, announce a meal in readiness, and would-be hosts come to the
curtains and anxiousl