Low voices.... There in the dimmest corner sat Captain Matthew, his chin dug deep in his grey dressing-gown, and beside him a little elderly man, his hat on his knees, his anxious, ordinary face turned towards the light.
A citizen ... a baker or a brewer, tinker, tailor, or candlestick-maker...?
There had been the buying of the uniform, the visits to the camp in England, the parcels to send out—always the parcels—week by week. And now nothing; no more parcels, no more letters, silence.
Only the last hungry pickings from Captain Matthew's tired memory and nervous speech.
I turned away with a great shrinking.
In a very few minutes the citizen went past my bunk door, his hat in his hand, his black coat buttoned; taking back to his home and his family the last facts that he might ever learn.
At the end of the passage he almost collided with that stretcher which bears a flag.
Of the two, the stretcher moved me least.
My Sister is afraid of death. She told me so. And not the less afraid, she said, after all she has seen of it. That is terrible.
But the new Sister is afraid of life. She is shorter-sighted.