ler. I don't doubt he was a
pattern of all the virtues.-- But for that matter I couldn't give
the child publichouse stuff.-- Now, my little friend, if you'll
lie quiet for five minutes, I'll see what's going on outside."

"Please may I have my skirt?"

"Your what?"

"My serge skirt."

It had not struck Lawrence till then that she was dressed in a
white muslin blouse and a pink and blue striped petticoat. "Do
you mean to say that was your skirt you gave me to tie up the
dog's head in?"

"I hadn't anything else," said Isabel still more apologetically,
and blushing--she was feeling very guilty, very much ashamed of
the trouble she had given: "and you don't know how fond Ben was
of Billy!"

"Oh, damn Billy!" said Lawrence for the second time.

He went out into the summer sunshine. The dog, the fallen man,
the fallen woman, not one of them had stirred a hair. All was
peaceful and clear in every note of black and white and scarlet
on the turf plat where they lay as if on a stage, in their green
setting of dimpled hillside and beech grove and marsh. There was
a sickly smell in the hot bright air which carried Lawrence back
to the trenches.

He went to examine the human wreckage. No need to examine Billy
--his record for good or ill was manifestly closed: and Lawrence
had a sickening suspicion that Mrs. Janaway too had finished with
a world which perhaps had not offered her much inducement to
remain in it. He lifted her up and laid her down again in a
decent posture, straightening her limbs and sweeping back her
clotted grey hair: no, no need to feel for the pulse in that
faded breast from which her husband had partly torn away the
neatly darned stuff bodice, so modest with its white tucker and
silver Mizpah brooch. Lawrence composed its disorder with a
reverent hand, spreading his own coat over her face.

He went on to Ben, and was frankly disappointed to find that Ben
was not dead--far from it: he gave a deep groan when Lawrence
rolled him over: but it was a case of broken arm and collarbone,
if not of spinal injury as well. Lawrence found a length of line
in the yard--Clara's clothes-line, in fact--and knotted it into
a triple cord, for, though no sane man could have got far in such
a state, it was on the cards that Janaway in his madness might
scramble up and wander away on the downs. So Lawrence lashed him
hand and foot, and Ben blinked and grinned at the sun and
slavered over his beard.

It w