keeps on coming back to it. Can't leave it alone."

"I know. He isn't quite an ordinary coward."

"I'm not sure. I've known chaps like that. Can't keep away from
the thing."

But she stuck to it. John's cowardice was not like other people's
cowardice. Other cowards going into danger had the imagination of horror.
He had nothing but the imagination of romantic delight. It was the
reality that became too much for him. He was either too stupid, or too
securely wrapped up in his dream to reckon with reality. It surprised him
every time. And he had no imaginative fear of fear. His fear must have
surprised him.

"He'll have got away from Bruges," she said.

"I don't think so. He'll have to put up at the Convent for a bit, to let
Gurney rest."

They had missed the Convent and were running down a narrow street towards
the Market Place when they found John. He came on across a white bridge
over a canal at the bottom. He was escorted by some Belgian women,
dressed in black; they were talking and pointing up the street.

He said he had been to lunch in the town and had lost himself there and
they were showing him the way back to the Convent.

She had seen all that before somewhere, John coming over the Canal bridge
with the women in black.... She remembered. That was in one of her three
dreams. Only what she saw now was incomplete. There had been something
more in the dream. Something had happened.

It happened half an hour later when she went out to find John in the
Convent garden where he was walking with the nuns. The garden shimmered
in a silver mist from the canal, the broad grass plots, the clipped
hedges, the cones and spikes of yew, the tall, feathery chrysanthemums,
the trailing bowers and arches, were netted and laced and webbed with the
silver mist. Down at the bottom of the path the forms of John and the
three women showed blurred and insubstantial and still.

Presently they emerged, solid and clear; the nuns in their black habits
and the raking white caps like wings that set them sailing along. They
were showing John their garden, taking a shy, gentle, absorbed
possession of him.

And as she came towards him John passed her without speaking. But his
face had turned to her with the look she had seen before. Eyes of hatred,
eyes that repudiated and betrayed her.

The nuns had stopped, courteously, to greet her; she fell behind with one
of them; the two others had overtaken John who had walked on, keeping