ng from Ghent, but we have only flown twenty kilometres
as yet.

However, most of the Corps have been up all night for several nights,
and the mist outside is a clinging and a biting mist, and everybody is
grateful.

I shall never forget the look of the E.s' drawing-room, smothered in
blankets and littered with the members of the Corps, who lay about it in
every pathetic posture of fatigue. A group of seven or eight snuggled
down among the blankets on the floor in front of the hearth like a camp
before a campfire. Janet McNeil, curled up on one window-seat, and
Ursula Dearmer, rolled in a blanket on the other, had the heart-rending
beauty of furry animals under torpor. The chauffeurs Tom and Bert made
themselves entirely lovable by going to sleep bolt upright on
dining-room chairs on the outer ring of the camp. The E.s' furniture
came in where it could with fantastic and incongruous effect.

I don't know how I got through the next three hours, for my obsession
came back on me again and again, and as soon as I shut my eyes I saw the
face and eyes of the wounded man. I remember sitting part of the time
beside Miss Ashley-Smith, wide-awake, in a corner of the room behind
Bert's chair. I remember wandering about the E.s' house. I must have got
out of it, for I also remember finding myself in their garden, at
sunrise.

And I remember the garden, though I was not perfectly aware of it at the
time. It had a divine beauty, a serenity that refused to enter into, to
ally itself in any way with an experience tainted by the sadness of the
retreat from Ghent.

But because of its supernatural detachment and tranquillity and its no
less supernatural illumination I recalled it the more vividly
afterwards.

It was full of tall bushes and little slender trees standing in a
delicate light. The mist had cleared to the transparency of still water,
so still that under it the bushes and the trees stood in a cold, quiet
radiance without a shimmer. The light itself was intensely still. What
you saw was not the approach of light, but its mysterious arrest. It was
held suspended in crystalline vapour, in thin shafts of violet and gold,
clear as panes; it was caught and lifted upwards by the high bushes and
the slender trees; it was veiled in the silver-green masses of their
tops. Every green leaf and every blade of grass was a vessel charged. It
was not so much that the light revealed these things as that these
things revealed the light.