“But you’ll get out of that,” suggested Joan. “You’ve got the actress face.” He needed her. She heard his passionate, low voice, as she had heard it in the little garden above Meudon: “Because you won’t be there; and without you I can do nothing.” What right had this poor, worn-out shadow to stand between them, to the end? Had love and life no claims, but only weakness? She had taken all, had given nothing. It was but reparation she was making. Why stop her?!

“But why leave it to his son,” argued Joan. “Why couldn’t the old man have set about it himself, instead of wasting thirty precious years?” She stood beneath the withered trees, beside the shattered fountain. The sad-faced ghosts peeped out at her from the broken windows of the little silent houses.

Crouching close to the ground, behind the spreading roots of a giant oak, she raised her eyes. Before her lay a sea of smooth, soft mud nearly a mile wide. From the centre rose a solitary tree, from which all had been shot away but two bare branches like outstretched arms above the silence. Beyond, the hills rose again. There was something unearthly in the silence that seemed to brood above that sea of mud. The old priest told her of the living men, French and German, who had stood there day and night sunk in it up to their waists, screaming hour after hour, and waving their arms, sinking into it lower and lower, none able to help them: until at last only their screaming heads were left, and after a time these, too, would disappear: and the silence come again. “I’ll be lonely and anxious till you come back,” he said. “But that will have to be my part of the fight.” He seemed relieved. “That’s what’s so wonderful about you,” he said. “I’ve met plenty of clever, brilliant women, but one could forget that they were women. You’re everything.”