Sheila hesitated. ‘I thought—if you married—there might be Bel. But if Mums really needs me, I’d leave anything, anyone ... for her. She knows that.’ The girl’s voice throbbed with feeling and a faint colour showed in her cheeks. ‘I’m very doubtful, though, whether she could or would stay here long—without you.’
Mark started and frowned.
‘She must! She’ll be safe here; and there’s no end of useful work for her on the spot. All the same—’ he paused, looking deep into the heart of the wood, at pine-stems rosy with shafts of light. ‘I believe you know best. She won’t stop. She’d break her heart. War comes cruel hard on the women.’
Sheila said nothing: but the set of her lips showed a faint line of strain that he had not noticed before. ‘Come for a quarter-deck prowl with me, Mouse,’ he said.
They paced the wide-flagged terrace, veined with moss, till near dinner-time; and only at the last did Mark speak the thought uppermost in his mind. They had reached the far end when he came to a standstill and faced her squarely.
‘Sheila—it goes against the grain asking favours for Bel, even of you and Mother; but you were such a brick before; and now—it’s a bit of an ordeal for her facing you all after—what happened up there. Otherwise she’d have been here sooner. Of course I’ll make her speak to Mums straight away, which may clear the air, between them. But I want you all to be ever so kind and not let her feel a shadow of awkwardness. Just pick up the threads again as if nothing had happened. Will you—for my sake?’
Sheila was leaning now against the balustrade, her hands pressed palm downwards on the stone work.
‘Yes, Mark,’ she said in an odd, contained voice, ‘I’ll do anything I can for your sake. But in my heart—’ she suddenly looked up at him with her clear honest eyes, ‘I can’t forgive her—ever!’
‘You?’ His surprise brought the blood to her cheeks. ‘But when it happened you were so—understanding. It was you who took the edge off my bitterness.’