back to Carton that
night. In that long motor drive a man took counsel with himself on whom
the war had laid a chastening and refining hand. The human personality
cannot spend itself on tasks of pity and service without taking the
colour of them, without rising insensibly to the height of them. They
may have been carelessly adopted, or imposed from without. But the mere
doing of them exalts. As the dyer's hand is 'subdued to what it works
in,' so the man that is always about some generous business for his
fellow-men suffers thereby, insensibly, a change, which is part of the
'heavenly alchemy' for ever alive in the world. It was so at any rate
with William Farrell. The two years of his hospital work--hard, honest
grappling with the problems of human pain and its relief--had made a far
nobler man of him. So now, in this solitary hour, he looked his
trouble--courageously, chivalrously--in the face. The crash of all his
immediate hopes was bitter indeed. What matter! Let him think only of
those two poor things about to meet in France.

As to the future, he was well aware of the emotional depths in Nelly's
nature. George Sarratt's claim upon her life and memory would now be
doubly strong. For, with that long and intimate observation of the war
which his hospital experience had brought him, Farrell was keenly aware
of the merciful fact that the mere distance which, generally speaking,
the war imposes between the man dying on the battle-field and those who
love him at home, inevitably breaks the blow. The nerves of the woman
who loses her husband or her son are, at least, not tortured by the
actual sight of his wounds and death. The suffering is spiritual, and
the tender benumbing touch of religion or patriotism, or the remaining
affections of life, has less to fight with than when the physical senses
themselves are racked with acute memories of bodily wounds and bodily
death. It is not that sorrow is less deep, or memory less tenacious; but
both are less ruinous to the person sorrowing. So, at least, Farrell had
often seen it, among even the most loving and passionate of women.
Nelly's renascence in the quiet Westmorland life had been a fresh
instance of it; and he had good reason for thinking that, but for the
tragic reappearance of George Sarratt, it would not have taken very
long,--a few months more, perhaps--before she would have been persuaded
to let herself love, and be loved again.

But now, every fibre in her delica