'Don't I always?' Bridget laughed.
'You do—you do indeed. Good-night.'
She touched Bridget's cheek with her lips and stole away.
Bridget was left to think. There was a dim light in the room showing the fine inlaid furniture, the flowery paper, the chintz-covered arm-chairs and sofa, and, through an open door, part of the tiled wall of the bathroom.
Miss Cookson had never slept in such a room before, and every item in it pleased a starved sense in her. Poverty was hateful! Could one never escape it?
Then she closed her eyes, and seemed to be watching Sir William and
Nelly in the gardens, his protecting eager air—her face looking up. Of
course she might have married him—with the greatest ease!—if only
George Sarratt had not been in the way.
But supposing—
All the talk that evening had been of a new 'push'—a new and steady offensive, as soon as the shell supply was better. George would be in that 'push.' Nobody expected it for another month. By that time he would be back at the front. She lay and thought, her eyes closed, her harsh face growing a little white and pinched under the electric lamp beside her. Potentially, her thoughts were murderous. The wish that George might not return formed itself clearly, for the first time, in her mind. Dreams followed, as to consequences both for Nelly and herself, supposing he did not return. And in the midst of them she fell asleep.
CHAPTER VII
August came, the second August of the war. The heart of England was sad and sick, torn by the losses at Gallipoli, by the great disaster of the Russian retreat, by the shortage of munitions, by the endless small fighting on the British front, which eat away the young life of our race, week by week, and brought us no further. But the spirit of the nation was rising—and its grim task was becoming nakedly visible at last. Guns—men! Nothing else to say—nothing else to do.