rutinising look. Then he moved on
beside her, and Cicely, in order to give Nelly the opportunity of
talking to him for which she evidently wished, was forced to carry off
Bridget, and endure her company patiently all the way home.

When Nelly and the doctor arrived, following close on the two in front,
Cicely cried out that Nelly must go and lie down at once till supper.
She looked indeed a deplorable little wraith; and the doctor, casting,
again, a professional eye on her, backed up Cicely.

Nelly smiled, resisted, and finally disappeared.

'You'll have to take care of her,' said Howson to Bridget. 'She looks to
me as if she couldn't stand any strain.'

'Well, she's not going to have any. This place is quiet enough! She's
been talking of munition-work, but of course we didn't let her.'

Cicely took the young man aside and expounded her brother's plan of the
farm on the western side of Loughrigg. Howson asked questions about its
aspect, and general comfort, giving his approval in the end.

'Oh, she'll pull through,' he said kindly, 'but she must go slow. This
kind of loss is harder to bear--physically--than death straight out.
I've promised her'--he turned to Bridget--'to make all the enquiries I
can. She asked me that at once.'

After supper, just as Howson was departing, Farrell appeared, having
driven himself over through the long May evening, ostensibly to take
Cicely home, but really for the joy of an hour in Nelly's company.

He sat beside her in the garden, after Howson's departure, reading to
her, by the lingering light, the poems of a great friend of his who had
been killed at Gallipoli. Nelly was knitting, but her needles were often
laid upon her knee, while she listened with all her mind, and sometimes
with tears in her eyes, that were hidden by the softly dropping dusk.
She said little, but what she did say came now from a greatly
intensified inner life, and a sharpened intelligence; while all the
time, the charm that belonged to her physical self, her voice, her
movements, was at work on Farrell, so that he felt his hour with her a
delight after his hard day's work. And she too rested in his presence,
and his friendship. It was not possible now for her to rebuff him, to
refuse his care. She had tried, tried honestly, as Cicely saw, to live
independently--to 'endure hardness.' And the attempt had broken down.
The strange, protesting feeling, too, that she was doing some wrong to
George by accepting i