John suffered the caress, but he looked embarrassed.
“I say,” he said; “that’s all right when we are alone; but don’t do it in front of the others.”
And then, in case he had hurt her feelings, he slipped an arm round her waist, and walked with her, carrying the puppy, down the garden path in the brief twilight before the darkness fell.
Book Four—Chapter Twenty Eight.
Four years passed away. They were the years of the Great War, which flung the world into mourning and left a pall of depression like a blighting legacy on its passing.
Among the men who left South Africa for Europe to fight for the old country was George Sinclair. He had been one of the first to go; and after three years, the greater part of which was spent in France, he was shot through the lung, and invalided out and sent for treatment to England.
During the years he was away he wrote to Esmé regularly. He had begged permission to write to her before he left. He did not ask her to write in reply; and for a long while she received his letters without any thought of answering them. But, as the war progressed and the horrors of war deepened, her sympathy with the man and her admiration for his cheerful courage, moved her to open a correspondence with him.
She kept this letter writing up after he was in hospital, until she learnt from him that he was well and shortly sailing for home. Then, though he still wrote every week, her letters ceased abruptly. She dreaded his coming out. She knew that he still loved her, that he meant to ask her to marry him. He had given her to understand that before he left. She liked him. In a friendly way she was fond of him; but all her love had been given to Paul Hallam; and, although she now accepted the evidence of his death, her heart still cherished his memory, and turned in unforgettable longing towards the past. Her happiness had ended in tragedy: but that was the common lot in those tragic times.