gone, as if she had
dreamed it or made it up.

Presently she would not have her work to keep her from thinking. The
Ambulance Corps was going out to Flanders at the end of September, and
it would take her car with it and a new driver.

Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.

"If I could only help you."

"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave
the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more
often she hid away somewhere by herself.

Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go
to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's
Veronica."

But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to
Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been
killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He
couldn't have had five hours' fighting.

"And to be killed--Retreating.

"He got nothing out of it but agony."

Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know
what he may have got in the last minute of it."

"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to
Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me.
But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.

"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"

"Now? You're more bound than ever, because he's more near you, more
alive."

"You wouldn't say that if you loved him."

* * * * *

One day a package came to her from Eltham. Two notes were enclosed with
it, one from Drayton's mother and one from Drayton:

"Frank said I was to send you this if he was killed. I think he must
have known that he would not come back."

* * * * *

"My Dear Dorothy,--You will think this is a very singular bequest. But I
want you to see that my memory is fairly good."

* * * * *

The very singular bequest was a Bible, with three cigarette-lighters for
markers, and a date on the fly-leaf: "July 5th, 1912."

The cigarette-lighters referred her to Psalm cxliv., and Isaiah xxxv.
and xl., and pencil marks to the verses:

"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war and my
fingers to fight."...

"And an highway shall be there ... the redeemed shall walk there, and
the ransomed of the Lord shall return" ...

... "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they