ich other
counties could hardly lay claim. If he wanted the little widow, why
certainly, let him have her! It was magnificent what he had done for his
hospital; when nobody before the war had thought him capable of a stroke
of practical work. Real good fellow, Farrell! Let him go in and win. His
devotion, and poor Nelly's beauty, only infused a welcome local element
of romance into the ever-darkening scene of war.

* * * * *

The first anniversary of Sarratt's disappearance was over. Nelly had
gone through it quite alone. Bridget was in London, and Nelly had said
to Cicely--'Don't come for a few days--nor Sir William--please! I
shall be all right.'

They obeyed her, and she spent her few days partly on the fells, and
partly in endless knitting and sewing for a war-workroom recently
started in her immediate neighbourhood. The emotion to which she
surrendered herself would soon reduce her to a dull vacancy; and then
she would sit passive, not forcing herself to think, alone in the old
raftered room, or in the bit of garden outside, with its phloxes and
golden rods; her small fingers working endlessly--till the wave of
feeling and memory returned upon her. Those few days were a kind of
'retreat,' during which she lived absorbed in the recollections of her
short, married life, and, above all, in which she tried piteously and
bravely to make clear to herself what she believed; what sort of faith
was in her for the present and the future. It often seemed to her that
during the year since George's death, her mind had been wrenched and
hammered into another shape. It had grown so much older, she scarcely
knew it herself. Doubts she had never known before had come to her; but
also, intermittently, a much keener faith. Oh, yes, she believed in God.
She must; not only because George had believed in Him, but also because
she, her very self, had been conscious, again and again, in the night
hours, or on the mountains, of ineffable upliftings and communings, of
flashes through the veil of things. And so there must be another world;
because the God she guessed at thus, with sudden adoring insight, could
not have made her George, only to destroy him; only to give her to him
for a month, and then strike him from her for ever. The books she learnt
to know through Farrell, belonging to that central modern literature,
which is so wholly sceptical that the 'great argument' itself has almost
lost interest fo