udy on getting in.

Noel went to the dining-room to drink her hot milk. The curtains were
not drawn, and bright moonlight was coming in. Without lighting up, she
set the etna going, and stood looking at the moon-full for the second
time since she and Cyril had waited for it in the Abbey. And pressing her
hands to her breast, she shivered. If only she could summon him from the
moonlight out there; if only she were a witch-could see him, know where
he was, what doing! For a fortnight now she had received no letter.
Every day since he had left she had read the casualty lists, with the
superstitious feeling that to do so would keep him out of them. She took
up the Times. There was just enough light, and she read the roll of
honour--till the moon shone in on her, lying on the floor, with the
dropped journal....

But she was proud, and soon took grief to her room, as on that night
after he left her, she had taken love. No sign betrayed to the house her
disaster; the journal on the floor, and the smell of the burnt milk which
had boiled over, revealed nothing. After all, she was but one of a
thousand hearts which spent that moonlit night in agony. Each night, year
in, year out, a thousand faces were buried in pillows to smother that
first awful sense of desolation, and grope for the secret spirit-place
where bereaved souls go, to receive some feeble touch of healing from
knowledge of each other's trouble....

In the morning she got up from her sleepless bed, seemed to eat her
breakfast, and went off to her hospital. There she washed up plates and
dishes, with a stony face, dark under the eyes.

The news came to Pierson in a letter from Thirza, received at lunch-time.
He read it with a dreadful aching. Poor, poor little Nollie! What an
awful trouble for her! And he, too, went about his work with the
nightmare thought that he had to break the news to her that evening.
Never had he felt more lonely, more dreadfully in want of the mother of
his children. She would have known how to soothe, how to comfort. On
her heart the child could have sobbed away grief. And all that hour, from
seven to eight, when he was usually in readiness to fulfil the functions
of God's substitute to his parishioners, he spent in prayer of his own,
for guidance how to inflict and heal this blow. When, at last, Noel
came, he opened. the door to her himself, and, putting back the hair from
her forehead, said: "Come in here a moment, my darl