For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She really was all right, Ellen?"
"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."
Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face, which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."
Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here, Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for Poppy. "Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."
They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.
Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."
"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the exceptional circumstances," murmured Ellen.
"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying: "Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly: "That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in the sky. Is that Chatham?"
With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it was."
"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage. It was quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.