and
insolence like her own. You could see her waiting for her revenge,
watching every minute for a chance to stick her blade into him. He was
pretending that he hadn't heard her.

His hair stood up in pointed tufts, rumpled from his pillow. His eyes had
a dazed, stupid look as if he were not perfectly awake. But at the sound
of the rasping voice his mouth had tightened; it was pinched and sharp
with pain. He didn't look at Mrs. Rankin. He came to her, Charlotte
Redhead, straight; straight as if she had drawn him from his sleep.

The McClane people got up, one after another, and went out.

"Charlotte," he said, "did you really think I'd left you?"

"I thought you'd left me. But I knew you hadn't."

"You _knew_ it wasn't possible?"

"Yes. Inside me I knew."

"I'm awfully sorry. Sutton told me you were going on with him, and I
thought you'd gone."

XI

She would remember for ever the talk they had on the balcony that day
while Antwerp was falling.

They were standing there, she and John Conway and Sutton, looking over
the station and the railway lines to the open country beyond: the fields,
the tall slender trees, the low mounds of the little hills, bristling and
dark. Round the corner of the balcony they could see into the _Place_
below; it was filled with a thick black crowd of refugees. Antwerp was
falling. Presently the ambulance train would come in and they would have
to go over there to the station with their stretchers and carry out the
wounded. Meanwhile they waited.

John brooded. His face was heavy and sombre with discontent. "No," he
said. "No. It isn't good enough."

"What isn't?"

"What we're doing here. Going to all those little tin-pot places. The
real fighting isn't down there. They ought to send us to Antwerp."

"I suppose they send us where they think we're most wanted."

"I don't believe they do. We were fools not to have insisted on going
to Antwerp, instead of letting ourselves be stuck here in a rotten
side show."

"We've had enough to do, anyhow," said Sutton.

"And there isn't anybody but us and Mac to do it," Charlotte said.

John's eyebrows twisted. "Yes; but we're not _in_ it. I want to be in it.
In the big thing; the big dangerous thing."

Sutton sighed and got up and left them. John waited for the closing
of the door.

"Does it strike you," he said, "that Billy isn't very keen?"

"No. It doesn't. What do you mean?"

"I notice that he's jolly glad when he can