had it _all_. One lives here a year in a day." And he'd
only been seven weeks at the front! He said it was the things he'd
seen--not the horrible things--but the glorious things that made
him feel like that. Now he did believe there was a God--and I must
believe it too.'

The tears ran down her face. Arthur held the quivering hands close
in his; and through his soldier's mind, alive with the latest and
innermost knowledge of the war, there flashed a terrible pre-vision
of the weeks to come, the weeks of the great offensive, the storm of
which might break any day--was certain, indeed, to break soon, and
would leave behind it, trampled like leaves into a mire of blood,
thousands of lives like Desmond's--Britain's best and rarest.

* * * * *

An hour later the hall was deserted, except for Elizabeth, who,
after seeing Pamela to bed, came down to write some household
letters by the only fire. Presently the surgeon who was sitting up
with Desmond appeared, looking worried. His countenance brightened
at sight of Elizabeth, with whom he had already had much practical
consultation.

'Could you persuade Mr. Mannering to go to bed?'

Elizabeth rose with some hesitation and followed him into the
library. The great room, once so familiar, now so strange, the
nurses in their white uniforms, moving silently, one standing by the
bed, watch in hand--Major Mannering on the farther side,
motionless--the smell of antiseptics, the table by the bed with all
its paraphernalia of bandages, cups, glasses, medicine bottles--the
stillness of brooding death which held it all--seemed to dash from
her any last, blind, unreasonable hope that she might have
cherished.

The Squire standing by the fire, where he had been opposing a
silent but impatient opposition to the attempt of doctor and nurses
to make him take some rest, saw Elizabeth enter. His eyes clung to
her as she approached him. So she _was_ near him--and he was not cut
off from her.

Then the surgeon watched with astonishment the sudden docility of a
man who had already seemed to him one of the most unmanageable of
persons. What spell had this woman exercised? At any rate, after a
few whispered words from her, the Squire bowed his white head and
followed her out of the room.

In the hall Elizabeth offered him a candle, and begged him to go to
bed. He shook his head, and pointed to a chair by the dying fire.

'That will do. Then I shall hear--'