It was some time before she fell asleep. The high glass faced her as she lay in bed. She could not get away from the idea that it was her mother’s face that every now and then she saw reflected there. “Oh, come,” struck in a youngster who was lying perfectly flat, face downwards on his bed: it was the position in which he could breathe easiest. He raised his head a couple of inches and twisted it round so as to get his mouth free. “It isn’t as bad as all that. Why, the Thirty-third swarmed into Fort Malmaison of their own accord, though ’twas like jumping into a boiling furnace, and held it for three days against pretty nearly a division. There weren’t a dozen of them left when we relieved them. They had no ammunition left. They’d just been filling up the gaps with their bodies. And they wouldn’t go back even then. We had to drag them away. ‘They shan’t pass,’ ‘They shan’t pass!’—that’s all they kept saying.” His voice had sunk to a thin whisper.!

“They do sometimes,” answered Hilda, “if you happen to be in the way, near the feeding troughs. If they’d only put all the refreshments into one room, one could avoid it. But they will scatter them about so that one never knows for certain whether one is in the danger zone or not. I hate a mob.” “How do you know that my being with him helps him?” asked Joan.

“I wonder,” he said. “You could hardly be your mother’s daughter without it.” “No, we don’t,” she said, “not those of us who think. We know we shall never oust man from his place. He will always be the greater. We want to help him; that’s all.” “Tell me,” said Joan. “What was my mother like? I can only remember her as more or less of an invalid.”