"You'll have him back," she said. "One of these days you'll have his head in your lap again."
For one moment they looked in each other's eyes. There was a compact in that look. In purpose they had found sympathy. Out of the deep bitterness of life they had found a meaning.
Once, as she walked away, Mary looked over her shoulder. The woman still sat there on the stile, still with her features cut sharp in profile against the sky, still gazing across the elm-treed hollows and the uplands all spread with gold of corn.
* * * * *
On Sunday night, October the fourth, in a little force of naval reserves, John marched from Ostend to his battle position on the Nethe.
Mary did not know where he had gone. He had not known himself. In the midst of his training, the order had come for his departure. Two hours he had had with her at Yarningdale; no more. All that time he had laughed and talked in the highest spirits. Constrained to laugh with him, her eyes had been bright, her courage wonderful.
It was not until she drove back alone in the spring cart from the station, that she knew the brightness in her eyes had sunk as in those other women's eyes to the sullen light of anger.
"Oh--the waste--the senseless waste of it!" she had muttered that night as she lay waiting for the relief of sleep.
The next five days had passed in silence. She went about her duties as usual, but none seeing her dared speak about the War. It was whispered only in that parlor kitchen; whispers that fell with sibilant noises into silence whenever she came into the room.
Each morning, as always, she took her papers away to her room to read. Nothing of that which she yearned to know could they tell her. On the ninth of October Antwerp had fallen. Amongst all the strongholds that were crumbling beneath the weight of the German guns, this meant nothing to her. She laid the paper down and went out into the fields.