“I was going home. And I was late. So I came this way. I only stopped for a moment—to pick the violets——”
She stooped for her basket, huddling into it all the little bunches that lay on the grass. She was thankful to have a use for her betraying hands.
He was watching her, but she did not know what he thought, for she was afraid to look up and see. She had her basket filled too soon, and thereupon she stood like a schoolgirl, not knowing what to say or do. She moved a step or two at last, to enable him to give her good-bye and go his way. But his way was hers, it seemed: and he walked beside her in silence down the green grass lane, between the whispering, watching trees. If he thought of his tea he thought also, I suppose that Mrs. Cloud would keep it hot for him. He was quite right: his mother would have kept it hot for him till the crack of doom. But it is just possible that he did not think about his tea.
Laura’s eyes were decorously on the increasing circle of sky at the end of the alley; yet with quick stolen glances now and then she gleaned news of him. She thought he looked tired, older—a grey look.... She thought he did not look well.... She disliked his yellowish clothes. They did not suit him....
Well—at least she had seen him in his uniform.... She had not realized before, she thought contradictorily, how jolly the ugly uniform could look.... She thought how ordinary every other soldier she had seen would look beside him.... She tried not to be ridiculously proud of him, because she had no right, no right—to that exquisite pride.... She thought that she had not been mistaken—there was no one in the world like him....
They came to a footpath through the hazel underwood that ran at right angles to the broad grass-way. She was sure he would make it his excuse for leaving her if he did not want to talk. And how should he possibly want to talk to her?... But Justin swung past the opening with no more than a switch with his cane at the low-hanging catkins that sent the pollen in clouds into the air. The target of sky still seemed a long way off. Almost she could have wished that he had left her, the silence oppressed her so. She supposed that she ought to talk to him about the war.... Ridiculous phrases flitted through her head—‘How do you like the trenches?’ ‘Do the guns make much noise?’—but she could think of no sensible opening.
At last to her intense relief, for speech was always as much her protection as silence was his, he opened his mouth.
“And how have you been rubbing along?” said Justin.
“Oh, all right,” said Laura. Then brilliantly: “Have you been all right?”
“Oh, quite all right,” said Justin.