s moustache and trying to train it upwards in
the way she hated.

* * * * *

One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the moustache
stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped. He was another
man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she hated him or not.

But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best gown to
do honour to his khaki.

She said, "It'll be like living with another man."

"You won't have very long to live with him," said Lawrence.

And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her passion
for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to violence, to
perversity.

And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out of her
reach. He refused to let her go with him to the place where he was
stationed.

"What would you do," she said, "if I followed you? Shoot me?"

"I might shoot _myself_. Anyhow, you'd never see me or hear from me
again."

* * * * *

He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.

She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent, till
she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it. Now that he had gone
she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a sort of peace.
She told herself that she would rather he were killed soon than that she
should be tortured any longer with suspense.

"If I saw his name in the lists this morning I shouldn't mind. That
would end it."

And she sent her servant to the stationer's to stop the papers for fear
lest she should see his name in the lists.

But Lawrence spared her. He was wounded in his first engagement, and
died of his wounds in a hospital at Dunkirk.

The Red Cross woman who nursed him wrote to Vera an hour before he died.
She gave details and a message.

* * * * *

"7.30. I'm writing now from his dictation. He says you're to forgive him
and not to be too sorry, because it was what he thought it would be (he
means the fighting) only much more so--all except this last bit.

"He wants you to tell Michael and Dicky?--Nicky?--that. He says: 'It's
odd I should be first when he got the start of me.'

"(I think he means you're to forgive him for leaving you to go to the
War.)"

* * * * *

"8.30. It is all over.

"He was too weak to say anything more. But he sent you his love."

* * *