"Do you think you'd be poor to me—if you hadn't a copper halfpenny?" And with his arm about her still, and her heart beating against his hand, as they moved over the grass together, she began to describe their home. Quite a small, unpretending, but comfortable home. The home of two people who adored each other, and wanted nothing better than to go on doing it up to the last day of their lives.
"We'll have children—stacks!" she assured him. "Long-legged boys with beaky, hatchet faces—boys who'll invent and build aëroplanes and fly them too, you bet!"
"And girls," put in Sherbrand, tightening his clasp about the supple womanly body, "great big galumphing girls, like their mother!"
"The sweets!" she sighed. "I can see them now!"
"Ah, that's what I shan't do ever," said Sherbrand. "Don't you think they'll be bored with their blind father, sometimes, Pat?"
"Just let them dare! Let them—that's all!" She winked away the tears crowding to her eyelashes. "Besides you mayn't be always blind—I'll never give up praying! Didn't that American surgeon at the Hospital say that cases of functional blindness from shock—like yours—supposing there is no serious lesion in the brain—have been known to recover sight suddenly and completely? Don't shake your head! Isn't there a chance—a blessed possibility—to cling to, and fight for? Ah! if you were cured, don't you know I'd send you back to the Front next day? Don't you, Alan? Yes!—yes! you do!" The bright drops rushed in spate over her underlids, and hopped over the front of her long blue coat, to lose themselves among the frosted grasses as she went hotly on:
"Don't you believe—you must believe—I'd lay down my life—just for the glory of doing that! Perhaps I usedn't to care much about England—before the War. But now I've found out what it means to be a pup of the old bull-mother,—I'd meet Death jumping—rather than fail cf doing my bit. What's up?"
Someone had whistled shrilly behind them, and she wheeled, to see Monseigneur and a Red Cross orderly beckoning and signalling, standing on a heap of rubbish on the outskirts of the Plaine. Sherbrand, for whom the call was meant, waved his stick and whistled in answer. The orderly, at a gesture from Monseigneur, got nimbly down from the rubbish-heap and started to cross the intervening stretch of grass.
"Why is he coming?" began Patrine, vexedly.
"To fetch the blind man, I suppose."