rilliantly in
pursuit of the person or the thing he needs, stand apart too in a blank,
blue purity, undarkened by any perception of the details that may
accumulate under his innocent nose. He has called this corps into being,
gathered these strange men and women up with a sweep of his wing and
swept them almost violently together. He doesn't know how any of us are
going to behave. He has taken for granted, with his naive and
heart-rending trust in the beauty of human nature, that we are all going
to behave beautifully. He is absorbed in his scheme. Each one of us
fits into it at some point, and if there is anything in us left over it
is not, at the moment, his concern.

Yet he himself has margins about him and a mysterious hinterland not to
be confined or accounted for by any scheme. He alone of us has the air,
buoyant, restless, and a little vague, of being in for some tremendous
but wholly visionary adventure.

When I look at him I wonder again what this particular adventure is
going to do to him, and whether he has, even now, any vivid sense of the
things that are about to happen. I remember that evening in my scullery,
and how he talked about the German siege-guns as if they were details in
some unreal scene, the most interesting part, say, of a successful
cinematograph show.

But they are really bringing up those siege-guns from Namur.

And the Commandant has brought four women with him besides me. I confess
I was appalled when I first knew that they would be brought.

Mrs. Torrence, perhaps--for she is in love with danger,[1] and she is of
the kind whom no power, military or otherwise, can keep back from their
desired destiny.

But why little Janet McNeil?[2] She is the youngest of us, an
eighteen-year-old child who has followed Mrs. Torrence, and will follow
her if she walks straight into the German trenches. She sits beside me
on my right, ready for anything, all her delicate Highland beauty
bundled up in the kit of a little Arctic explorer, utterly determined,
utterly impassive. Her small face, under the woolly cap that defies the
North Pole, is nearly always grave; but it has a sudden smile that is
adorable.

And the youngest but one, Ursula Dearmer, who can't be so much
older--Mr. Riley's gloom and the Commandant's hinterland are nothing to
the mystery of this young girl. She looks as if she were not yet
perfectly awake, as if it would take considerably more than the
siege-guns of Namur to rouse her.