Her hand stole out to him across the table, but she kept her face away from him. Until she felt his grasp grow tight, and then she turned and their eyes met. “And God has been good to us, also,” he explained.!

“Better not go on, nurse,” said one of them. “It’s some poor devil of a Conchy, I expect. Must have a damned sight more pluck than I should.” There was a distinct challenge in Flossie’s eye as she asked the question. Joan felt herself flush, and thought a moment.

But even that did not help her. It seemed in some mysterious way to be no longer her room, but the room of someone she had known and half forgotten: who would never come back. It gave her the same feeling she had experienced on returning to the house in London: that the place was haunted. The high cheval glass from her mother’s dressing-room had been brought there for her use. The picture of an absurdly small child—the child to whom this room had once belonged—standing before it naked, rose before her eyes. She had wanted to see herself. She had thought that only her clothes stood in the way. If we could but see ourselves, as in some magic mirror? All the garments usage and education has dressed us up in laid aside. What was she underneath her artificial niceties, her prim moralities, her laboriously acquired restraints, her unconscious pretences and hypocrisies? She changed her clothes for a loose robe, and putting out the light drew back the curtains. The moon peeped in over the top of the tall pines, but it only stared at her, indifferent. It seemed to be looking for somebody else. “But the people are more powerful now,” argued Joan. “If the farmer demanded higher prices, they could demand higher wages.” Mary blushed like a child that has been found out just as it was hoping that it had not been noticed.