till lay snuggling down amiably in the
warmth, and those that had started to their feet in dismay, and those
that sat on chairs upright and apart, were hostile with a just and
righteous hostility, that they had an intimate knowledge of my crime,
and had risen up in abhorrence of the thing I was.

And somewhere, as if they were far off in some blessed place on the
other side of this nightmare, I was aware of the merciful and pitiful
faces of Mrs. Lambert and Janet McNeil.

Then, close beside me, there was a sudden heaving of the Chaplain's
broad shoulders as he faced the room.

And I heard him saying, in the same voice in which he had declared that
he was going to hold Matins, that it wasn't my fault at all--that it was
_he_ who had persuaded Miss Ashley-Smith to go back to Ghent.[36]

The Chaplain has a moral nerve that never fails him.

Then Mrs. Torrence says that she is going back to protect Miss
Ashley-Smith, and Ursula Dearmer says that she is going back to protect
Mrs. Torrence, and somebody down in the blankets remarks that the thing
was settled last night, and that all this going back is simply rotten.

I can only repeat that it is all my fault, and that therefore, if Mrs.
Torrence goes back, nobody is going back with her but me.

And there can be no doubt that three motor ambulances, with possibly the
entire Corps inside them, certainly with the five women and the Chaplain
and the Commandant, would presently have been seen tearing along the
road to Ghent, one in violent pursuit of the other, if we had not
telephoned and received news of Miss Ashley-Smith's safe arrival at the
"Flandria," and orders that no more women were to return to Ghent.

Among all the variously assorted anguish of that halt at Ecloo the
figures and the behaviour of Mrs. E. and her husband and their children
are beautiful to remember--their courtesy, their serenity, their gentle
and absolving wonder that anybody should see anything in the least
frightful or distressing, or even disconcerting and unusual, in the
situation; the little girl who sat beside me, showing me her
picture-book of animals, accepting gravely and earnestly all that you
had to tell her about the ways of squirrels, of kangaroos and opossums,
while we waited for the ambulance cars to take us to Bruges; the boy who
ran after us as we went, and stood looking after us and waving to us in
the lane; the aspect of that Flemish house and garden as we left
them--there is n