t _have_ you got on your boots? They're soaking wet.
Change them at once.'

Not only did Mary obey but she wrapped the boots in a newspaper, and
put them into the string bag with the bottle. So, armed with the longest
kitchen poker, she left.

'It's raining again,' was Miss Fowler's last word, 'but--I know you
won't be happy till that's disposed of.'

'It won't take long. I've got everything down there, and I've put the
lid on the destructor to keep the wet out.'

The shrubbery was filling with twilight by the time she had completed
her arrangements and sprinkled the sacrificial oil. As she lit the match
that would burn her heart to ashes, she heard a groan or a grunt behind
the dense Portugal laurels.

'Cheape?' she called impatiently, but Cheape, with his ancient lumbago,
in his comfortable cottage would be the last man to profane the
sanctuary. 'Sheep,' she concluded, and threw in the fusee. The pyre went
up in a roar, and the immediate flame hastened night around her.

'How Wynn would have loved this!' she thought, stepping back from the
blaze.

By its light she saw, half hidden behind a laurel not five paces away, a
bareheaded man sitting very stiffly at the foot of one of the oaks. A
broken branch lay across his lap--one booted leg protruding from beneath
it. His head moved ceaselessly from side to side, but his body was as
still as the tree's trunk. He was dressed--she moved sideways to look
more closely--in a uniform something like Wynn's, with a flap buttoned
across the chest. For an instant, she had some idea that it might be
one of the young flying men she had met at the funeral. But their heads
were dark and glossy. This man's was as pale as a baby's, and so closely
cropped that she could see the disgusting pinky skin beneath. His
lips moved.

'What do you say?' Mary moved towards him and stooped.

'Laty! Laty! Laty!' he muttered, while his hands picked at the dead wet
leaves. There was no doubt as to his nationality. It made her so angry
that she strode back to the destructor, though it was still too hot to
use the poker there. Wynn's books seemed to be catching well. She looked
up at the oak behind the man; several of the light upper and two or
three rotten lower branches had broken and scattered their rubbish on
the shrubbery path. On the lowest fork a helmet with dependent strings,
showed like a bird's-nest in the light of a long-tongued flame.
Evidently this person had fallen through the tree