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did it really mean to
him?--what would it mean to _her_--if she were left alone? Images
passed through his mind--the sights of the trenches--shattered and
dying bodies. What was the _soul_?--had it really an independent life?
Something there was in men--quite rough and common men--something
revealed by war and the sufferings of war--so splendid, so infinitely
beyond anything he had ever dreamed of in ordinary life, that to think
of it roused in him a passion of hidden feeling--perhaps adoration--but
vague and speechless--adoration of he knew not what. He did not speak

easily of his feeling, even to his young wife, to whom marriage had so
closely, so ineffably bound him. But as he lay on the grass looking up
at her--smiling--obeying her command of silence, his thoughts ranged
irrepressibly. Supposing he fell, and she lived on--years and years--to
be an old woman? Old! Nelly? Impossible! He put his hand gently on
the slender foot, and felt the pulsing life in it. 'Dearest!' she murmured
at his touch, and their eyes met tenderly.
'I should be content--' he thought--'if we could just live this life out! I
don't believe I should want another life. But to go--and leave her; to
go--just at the beginning--before one knows anything--before one has
finished anything--'
And again his eyes wandered from her to the suffusion of light and
colour on the lake. 'How could anyone ever want anything better than
this earth--this life--at its best--if only one were allowed a full and
normal share of it!' And he thought again, almost with a leap of
exasperation, of those dead and mangled men--out there--in France.
Who was responsible--God?--or man? But man's will is--must
be--something dependent--something included in God's will. If God
really existed, and if He willed war, and sudden death--then there must
be another life. Or else the power that devised the world was not a good,
but an evil--at best, a blind one.
But while his young brain was racing through the old puzzles in the old
ways, Nelly was thinking of something quite different. Her delicate
small face kept breaking into little smiles with pensive intervals--till at
last she broke out--
'Do you remember how I caught you--turning back to look after us--just
here--just about here? You had passed that thorn tree--'
He came back to love-making with delight.
'"Caught me!" I like that! As if you weren't looking back too! How else
did you know anything about me?'
He had taken his seat beside her on the rock, and her curly black head

was nestling against his shoulder. There was no one on the mountain
path, no one on the lake. Occasionally from the main road on the
opposite shore there was a passing sound of wheels. Otherwise the
world was theirs--its abysses of shadow, its 'majesties of light.'
She laughed joyously, not attempting to contradict him. It was on this
very path, just two months before the war, that they had first seen each
other. She with her father and Bridget were staying at Mrs. Weston's
lodgings, because she, Nelly, had had influenza, and the doctor had sent
her away for a change. They knew the Lakes well already, as is the way
of Manchester folk. Their father, a hard-worked, and often melancholy
man, had delighted in them, summer and winter, and his two girls had
trudged about the fells with him year after year, and wanted nothing
different or better. At least, Nelly had always been content. Bridget had
grumbled often, and proposed Blackpool, or Llandudno, or Eastbourne
for a change. But their father did not like 'crowds.' They came to the
Lakes always before or after the regular season. Mr. Cookson hated the
concourse of motorists in August, and never would use one himself.
Not even when they went from Ambleside to Keswick. They must
always walk, or go by the horse-coach.
Nelly presently looked up, and gave a little pull to the corner of her
husband's moustache.
'Of course you know you behaved abominably that next day at
Wythburn! You kept that whole party waiting while you ran after us.
And I hadn't dropped that bag. You knew very well I hadn't dropped it!'
He chuckled.
'It did as well as anything else. I got five minutes' talk with you. I found
out where you lodged.'
'Poor papa!'--said Nelly reflectively--'he was so puzzled. "There's that
fellow we saw at Wythburn again! Why on earth does he come here to
fish? I never saw anybody catch a thing in this bit of the river." Poor
papa!'

They were both silent a little. Mr. Cookson had not lived long enough
to see Nelly and George Sarratt engaged. The war had killed him.
Financial embarrassment was already closing on him when it broke out,
and he could not stand the shock and the