CHAPTER XXXI
| "God gave us grace to love you Men whom our hearts hold dear; We too have faced the battle Striving to hide our fear. |
| "God gave us strength to send you, Courage to let you go; All that it meant to lose you Only our sad hearts know. |
| "Yet by your very manhood Hold we your honour fast. God shall give joy to England When you come home at last." |
Not till she felt Mabel's soft warm lips on her cheek and knew herself held in the other's arms, did Joan wake to the fact that the marriage was finished and that she was Dick's wife. All the morning she had moved and answered questions and smiled, when other people smiled, in a sort of trance, out of which she was afraid to waken. The only fact that stood out very clear was that Dick was going away in the afternoon; every time she saw a clock it showed that the afternoon was so many minutes nearer.
"You have got to help me to be brave," she had said to Dick the night before. "Other women let their men go, and make no outward fuss. I don't want to be different to them."
"And you won't be," he had answered, kissing her. "If you feel like crying, just look at me, and as your lord and master, I'll frown at you to show that I don't approve."
He himself was in the wildest, most hilarious of spirits. As he had said to Joan, the thought of death had only touched upon his mind for a second; now the mere idea of it seemed ridiculous. He was going out to help in a great fight, and he was going to marry Joan. She would be waiting for him when he came back; what could a man want more?
The Rutherfords came up on Friday to spend the night before the wedding in town, and in the evening Joan and Dick went to a theatre. It was, needless to say, his idea, but he did it with a notion that it would cheer Joan up. If you want to know real misery, sit through a musical comedy with someone you love more than the whole world next to you, and with the knowledge that he is going to the War the next day in your heart. Joan thought of it every moment. When the curtain was up and the audience in darkness, Dick would slip his hand into hers and hold it, but his eyes followed the events on the stage, and he could laugh quite cheerfully at the funny man's antics. Joan never even looked at them; she sat with her eyes on Dick, just watching him all the time. When they had driven back to the hotel at which the Rutherfords were staying, and in the taxi Dick had taken her into his arms and rather fiercely made her swear that she loved him, that she was glad to be marrying him, some shadow from her anguish had touched on him, it seemed he could not let her go. "Damn to-morrow!" he said hoarsely, and held her so close that the pressure hurt, yet she was glad of the pain as it came from him.