"Happened?" he asked.
"Yes. You're looking as though you'd just received a thousand pounds from a noble publisher for your first book—both solemn and sanctified."
"I'll tell you all about it one day," he said. He told her something then, of the rescue, the staying of Christina in his room, the arrival of the uncle.
He spoke of it all lightly. "He was a nice fellow," he said, "like a pirate. He said the mother wouldn't trouble us again and she hasn't. He carried Christina off to his hotel. He asked me to dinner then, but I didn't go . . . yes, and they left for Denmark two days later. . . . No, I didn't see them off. I didn't see them again."
Millie looked in her brother's eyes and asked no more questions. But Henry had grown in stature; he was hobbledehoy no longer. More than ever they needed one another now, and more than ever they were independent of all the world.
They found a place in the crowd just inside the Admiralty Arch. It was a lovely autumn day, the sunlight soft and mellow, the grey patterns of the Arch rising gently into the blue, the people stretched like long black shadows beneath the walls.
When the procession came there was reverence and true pathos. For a moment the complexities, turmoils, selfishnesses, struggles that the War had brought in its train were drawn into one simple issue, one straightforward emotion. Men might say that that emotion was sentimental, but nothing so sincerely felt by so many millions of simple people could be called by that name. The coffin passed with the admirals and the generals; there was a pause and then the crowd broke into the released space, voices were raised, there was laughter and shouting, every one pushing here and there, multitudes trying to escape from the uneasy emotion that had for a moment caught them, multitudes too remembering some one lost for a moment but loved for ever, typified by that coffin, that tin hat, that little wailing tune.
Millie's hand was through Henry's arm. "Wait a moment," she said. "There'll be the pause at eleven o'clock. Let's stay here and listen for it."
They stood on the curb while the crowd, noisy, cheerful, exaggerated, swirled back and forwards around them. Suddenly eleven o'clock boomed from Big Ben. Before the strokes were completed there was utter silence; as though a sign had flashed from the sky, the waters of the world were frozen into ice. The omnibuses in Trafalgar Square stayed where they were; every man stood his hat in his hand. The women held their children with a warning clasp. The pigeons around the Arch rose fluttering and crying into the air, the only sound in all the world. The two minutes seemed eternal. Tears came into Millie's eyes, hesitated, then rolled down her cheeks. For that instant it seemed that the solution of the earth's trouble must be so simple. All men drawn together like this by some common impulse that they all could understand, that they would all obey, that would force them to forget their individual selfishnesses, but would leave them, in their love for one another, individuals as they had never been before. "Oh! it can come! It must come!" Millie's heart whispered. "God grant that I may live until that day."