"I am sorry my hand shook," she said, almost pitifully to the doctor, when she held she had failed to give him all the help she should have done over a young lad who had been brought in badly hurt. "But he seemed so very young. It made me think of the time when all these poor boys were babies in their mothers' arms, warm, secure, sheltered."
He looked at her gravely.
"You did very well," he said. "Not quite so well as usual, perhaps; but better than others. For all that, I am going to send you for a rest--only a week or two," he added hastily, seeing her face set in denial. "And it's as useful as anything else. You know there are quite a lot of soldiers' wives down in the town. There ought not to be, of course, but there are---- Why, there is one, at least, in the camp! And one, an Irishwoman, has just died with her third baby--shock--husband killed. And there is no one to see to them and others. You'd better go--you--you like children."
To tell the truth Marrion felt a strange gladness at the thought of them, and the very idea of holding the newborn scrap of humanity in her arms was enthralling.
"For a week," she demurred. "You see I haven't been sleeping well."
So down by the sea in a house built on the very rocks of the harbour she went back to woman's normal life and rested for a while.
For the first time she had leisure to notice the beauties of the cliff-set coast, of which the bay was a mere shallow curve. The vessels lying at the roads bobbed and swayed when the wind ruffled the water, almost as if they had been at sea. But it was fine to see them there; ships of the line, merchantmen, gun-boats, mail-steamers, all coming and going. When the two elder children were asleep, Marrion would wrap the infant in a blanket and go and sit on the rocks in the sunshine, watching the boats go backwards and forwards to the shore, and thinking of the far-off Aberdeenshire days when she could pull an oar with any man. The harbour itself, a mere inlet, was crammed with vessels of all descriptions; you could scarcely distinguish one from the other, but the thirty outside showed bravely.
"They say the anchorage is very treacherous," remarked Doctor Forsyth, when he came to see how she was getting on, one evening. "I hear that a captain of one of the transports has reported it dangerous; and has been reprimanded for his trouble. He may have a chance of proving himself right, for the barometer is going down steadily, I'm told; and there is an uncanny feel in the air."
That was about six o'clock in the evening. But the night was calm, warm for the time of the year. It was in the small hours of the 14th that someone relieving watch on one of the ships looked again at the barometer.
"My God!" he exclaimed, "it has fallen two inches in the watch."