which
we foolishly call the Siege of Verdun, was soon to be seen. Hard pressed
they were, those heroes of Verdun!--how hard pressed no one in England
knew outside the War Office and the Cabinet, till the worst was over,
and the Crown Prince, 'with his dead and his shame,' had recoiled in
sullen defeat from the prey that need fear him no more.

Then on the first of July, the British army, after a bombardment the
like of which had never yet been seen in war, leapt from its trenches on
the Somme front, and England held her breath while her new Armies proved
of what stuff they were made. In those great days 'there were no
stragglers--none!' said an eye-witness in amazement. The incredible
became everywhere the common and the achieved. Life was laid down as at
a festival. 'From your happy son'--wrote a boy, as a heading to his last
letter on this earth.

And by the end of July the sun was ablaze again on the English fields
and harvests. Days of amazing beauty followed each other amid the
Westmorland fells; with nights of moonlight on sleeping lakes, and
murmuring becks; or nights of starlit dark, with that mysterious glow in
the north-west which in the northern valleys so often links the evening
with the dawn.

How often through these nights Nelly Sarratt lay awake, in her new white
room in Mountain Ash Farm!--the broad low window beside her open to the
night, to that 'Venus's Looking Glass' of Loughrigg Tarn below her, and
to the great heights beyond, now dissolving under the moon-magic, now
rosy with dawn, and now wreathed in the floating cloud which crept in
light and silver along the purple of the crags. To have been lifted to
this height above valley and stream, had raised and strengthened her,
soul and body, as Farrell and Hester had hoped. Her soul, perhaps,
rather than her body; for she was still the frailest of creatures,
without visible ill, and yet awakening in every quick-eyed spectator the
same misgiving as in the Manchester doctor. But she was calmer, less
apparently absorbed in her own grief; though only, perhaps, the more
accessible to the world misery of the war. In these restless nights,
her remarkable visualising power, which had only thriven, it seemed,
upon the flagging of youth and health, carried her through a series of
waking dreams, almost always concerned with the war. Under the stimulus
of Farrell's intelligence, she had become a close student of the war.
She read much, and what she read, his li