What's death?—You'll love me yet! Pippa Passes.
"Lettice, I've been down to Poupehan!"
 
Lettice was darning her stockings in the shade of the tower. Lettice would have darned her stockings on the Judgment Day. She suspended her work to look up, slowly, at Dorothea. Rose-brown, panting from the steep hill, lips laughing, eyes sparkling with excitement, she flung herself down among the stubble and the pink convolvuluses and fanned her face with her handkerchief.
 
"Oh, I'm so hot! I ran nearly the whole way. I went to try for a paper, and I fell over M. Lapouse, and oh, Lettice, what do you think he told me? There's been a French plane brought down near Florenville, and the pilot's escaped, and they're hunting him all over the place! Oh! don't you hope he'll get away?"
 
Lettice remained looking at her for a minute, then lowered her eyes and slowly resumed her work. Dorothea flounced away with an energy that upset Madame Hasquin's workbasket.
 
"Well, you are a fish! I did think you'd be interested in this. Don't you want to hear about it? Don't you care?"
 
"Was—was the man hurt?" asked Lettice.
 
"No, they don't think so, or not much—he managed to burn his machine, anyway. Oh! don't I wish I'd been there! We might have patched her up between us, and flown her to the French lines. Oh! it would have been sport!"
 
"It's, it's—it's twenty miles to Florenville, isn't it?"[Pg 266] Lettice pursued her train of thought in her own undeviating way.
 
"Yes, about. Why?"
 
"And when did it happen?"
 
"When did she come down, do you mean? Yesterday morning. Oh, were you thinking he might have come up here? He never would, Lettice. No such luck! He would make for the Dutch frontier, they always do, M. Lapouse was saying so. They're hardly even searching west of Bouillon."
 
"O-oh."
 
Lettice went on darning. Lettice in those days was hardly a personality. Withdrawn into herself, ensimismada, as Gardiner would have said, for hours on end she did not speak, she scarcely thought; she brooded. Her mind had been bruised and it was numb. She was like an automaton; the one definite feeling that emerged was an unwavering hostility to the destroyers of the Bellevue. Dorothea was compassionate to a fair young hussar who limped to the door one day after a fall from his horse; she gave him breakfast, put his sprained arm in a sling, and sent him on his way with good wishes in valiant German. Lettice made his coffee and broiled his ham—if thine enemy hunger, feed him; but he remained her enemy still. There were no good wishes from her.
 
Dorothea with an enormous sigh pulled over a bunch of stockings for a pillow, and lay back, still panting, hands clasped behind her head. She did not find Lettice a very satisfactory companion in those days. She was not an automaton, far from it! They had been at the farm for several weeks now, and she was wondering how much longer she could stand it. The same view, day after day—the steep down-slope of the meadow, the green velvet crease where the brook ran, the steep up-slope of the harvest field, silvery, with its slowly discoloring sheaves, the spires of the wood against the uneventful azure of the sky—oh dear! She wanted to fight, to defend her country, to stick bayonets into Germans, as they had stuck them into that dead girl[Pg 267] in the woods—as she had already stuck a knife into the Uhlan. She held up her little brown hand; it didn't seem possible, yet it was true, that that hand had accounted for one of the enemy, and she wasn't sorry, no, she couldn't feel one little bit ashamed, though she knew in her heart that at the moment when she pushed the body over the lip of the well she hadn't been quite sure that it wasn't still breathing....
 
She tucked the hand back with a little shudder. That didn't bear thinking about. "Well, why didn't I stick a knife into Lieutenant Müller, then?" she reflected. Müller was the hussar. "There's no sense in me!" Hot and cold was Dorothea, Charlotte Corday one hour, Florence Nightingale the next. Inaction, presumably the woman's natural lot, was not natural to her. But for Lettice she would long ago have dressed up in one of Achille's suits and made a dash for the French lines—
 
"'Tis but the coat of a page to borrow
And tie my hair in a horse-boy's trim—"
She didn't love skirts at the best of times—
 
"And I sit by his side, and laugh at sorrow—"
Denis. All her thoughts always came back to him.
 
Denis was fighting, and she wanted news; oh! she did want news so badly! Tears came hot in her eyes; she turned over and buried her face in the grass, struggling with the sudden pain. Denis was fighting; any one of these blue days he might be dying; he might be already dead. And he hadn't forgiven her. Oh! she, with this vulture at her heart, how could she sit quiet, brood on still anger, like Lettice? She must be white-washing the kitchen, or helping wounded Germans, or exciting herself over stranded French aeroplanes twenty miles away—anything, anything to get away from her thoughts!
 
"There's a man in the wood," observed Lettice.
 
She had dropped her work and sat immobile, her intent[Pg 268] gaze probing the shadows of the distant trees. Dorothea with an impatient sigh rolled over and sat up too.
 
"Where?"
 
"There, under that fir-tree—don't you see him? Now he, he, he's stooping down behind the bush."
 
"What eyes you have, Lettice!" said Dorothea, screwing up her own. "I can't see any old thing!"
 
"I've been watching him for some time. I think he's hiding."
 
"Hiding?"
 
"He was there before you came back, and then he got down out of sight. I don't think he can get away. I think he's hurt."
 
"Hurt?" Dorothea repeated wonderingly.
 
"There's been a lot of firing this morning down by the river."
 
"But, Lettice, you don't think—"
 
Lettice did not say she thought anything. She stuck her needle in her stocking and prepared to get up. She stood a moment shading her eyes, pie............