, like a devotee
contemplating the altar, was more real than anything he had ever felt
for those other women.

The bus came down the road to them and he stepped forward, shouting and
lifting his stick. But it swept on, packed with soldiers in red coats,
who sent out into the darkness behind them a fan of song. "It's the
soldiers from the barracks at Glencorse, bother them," sighed Ellen.
"And dear knows when there's a train." She spoke with such a flat
extremity of despair that he peered at her through the darkness and
found that her head had fallen back and her eyes were almost closed.
Evidently she had been overcome by one of those sudden prostrations to
which young people are liable when they have spilt out their strength
too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the _Gondomar_ had been
scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a
cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with
inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all
right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an
hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the
station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in a tone
that sounded as if her mind was inaccessible with somnolence, "I'm half
asleep."

The train was in when they reached the station, and he told her to take
a seat in it while he got the tickets. But she did not. Its carriages
were not yet lit, and it looked black and cold and cheerless, like those
burned buildings they had seen at Balerno; and anyway, she did not want
to take that train. She would have liked to turn back with him through
the dark avenues into the Pentlands. The sunset, which had somehow been
as vexing as it was beautiful, would by then have receded utterly before
the kind, sleepy darkness, undisturbed there in the valley by the
wee-est cottage light. It would be good to lie down for the night on the
heather of some ledge on the hillside where one could hear the Logan
Burn talking as it ran from the fall, and to look up and see Mr.
Yaverland sitting in that nice slouching way he had, a great black shape
against the stars. But that was a daft idea. She was annoyed for
thinking of anything so foolish, and when he came out and chid her for
standing about on the windy platform she found nothing on her lips but a
cross murmur.

That did not really matter, for one could not hurt grown-up people. They
were always happy. Eve