. He said that up till
midnight we weren't absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn't recover, and
that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in
the convent.

"My safety is to be considered before everything?" she said.

He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.

I can't think why she didn't see through him. I and Kendal and Colville
knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe. I
think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep
her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the
Germans to march into Ghent.

So we took her to him.

We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had
given up to him. He lay under a crucifix on the nun's narrow bed, which
was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets
at the bottom. The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his
head.

He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending
out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.

He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from
us as we came in.

The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, "Oh yes, you can come
in, all of you; it will make no difference."

The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go
in by herself. We two stood in the doorway and looked in. After the first
glance at the bed--it was enough for me--I looked, I couldn't help
looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of
the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could
have seen him.

He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of
his back--under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages
and dressings of his wound--that upset her; his back that might have been
any man's back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that
disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly
pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into
his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little
greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was Charlie's head.

She went slowly round the bed, taking care not to graze the feet that
were stretched out to her. And then she saw him.

She saw a deep purplish flush and glazed eyes that couldn't see her, and
a greyish beard pointing on an unshaved jaw; a