'Well, I shall be ready to go as early as you like on Monday, Bridget.
It was awfully good of you to pack all my things so nicely!'

'Don't I always?' Bridget laughed.

'You do--you do indeed. Good-night.'

She touched Bridget's cheek with her lips and stole away.

Bridget was left to think. There was a dim light in the room showing the
fine inlaid furniture, the flowery paper, the chintz-covered arm-chairs
and sofa, and, through an open door, part of the tiled wall of the
bathroom.

Miss Cookson had never slept in such a room before, and every item in
it pleased a starved sense in her. Poverty was _hateful_! Could one
never escape it?

Then she closed her eyes, and seemed to be watching Sir William and
Nelly in the gardens, his protecting eager air--her face looking up. Of
_course_ she might have married him--with the greatest ease!--if only
George Sarratt had not been in the way.

But supposing--

All the talk that evening had been of a new 'push'--a new and steady
offensive, as soon as the shell supply was better. George would be in
that 'push.' Nobody expected it for another month. By that time he would
be back at the front. She lay and thought, her eyes closed, her harsh
face growing a little white and pinched under the electric lamp beside
her. Potentially, her thoughts were murderous. The _wish_ that George
might not return formed itself clearly, for the first time, in her mind.
Dreams followed, as to consequences both for Nelly and herself,
supposing he did not return. And in the midst of them she fell asleep.

CHAPTER VII

August came, the second August of the war. The heart of England was sad
and sick, torn by the losses at Gallipoli, by the great disaster of the
Russian retreat, by the shortage of munitions, by the endless small
fighting on the British front, which eat away the young life of our
race, week by week, and brought us no further. But the spirit of the
nation was rising--and its grim task was becoming nakedly visible at
last. _Guns--men!_ Nothing else to say--nothing else to do.

George Sarratt's battalion returned to the fighting line somewhere about
the middle of August. 'But we are only marking time,' he wrote to his
wife. 'Nothing doing here, though the casualties go on every day.
However we all know in our bones there will be plenty to do soon. As for
me I am--more or less--all right again.'

Indeed, as September wore on, expectation quickened on both sides of the
Chann