long as it would do any good to John, she
would lie.

Her time had come. She remembered saying that. She could hear herself
talking to John at Barrow Hill Farm: "Everybody's got their breaking
point.... I daresay when my time comes I shall funk and lie."

Well, didn't she? Funk--the everlasting funk of wondering what John would
do next; and lying, lying at every turn to save him. _He_ was her
breaking point.

She had lied, the first time they went out, about the firing. She
wondered whether she had done it because then, even then, she had been
afraid of his fear. Hadn't she always somehow, in secret, been afraid?
She could see the car coming round the corner by the Church in the narrow
street at Stow, she could feel it grazing her thigh, and John letting her
go, jumping safe to the curb. She had pretended that it hadn't happened.

But that first day--No. He had been brave then. She had only lied because
she was afraid he would worry about her.... Brave then. Could war tire
you and wear you down, and change you from yourself? In two weeks? Change
him so that she had to hate him!

Half the night she lay awake wondering: Do I hate him because he doesn't
care about me? Or because he doesn't care about the wounded? She could
see all their faces: the face of the wounded man at Melle (_he_ had
crawled out on his hands and knees to look for her); the face of the dead
boy who hadn't died when John left him; the Flamand they brought from
Lokeren, lying in the road; the face of the dead man in the shed--And
John's face.

How could you care for a thing like that? How could you want a thing like
that to care for you?

And she? She didn't matter. Nothing mattered in all the world but Them.

XIV

It was Saturday, the tenth of October, the day after the fall of Antwerp.
The Germans were pressing closer round Ghent; they might march in any
day. She had been in Belgium a hundred years; she had lived a hundred
years under this doom.

But at last she was free of John. Utterly free. His mind would have no
power over her any more. Nor yet his body. She was glad that he had not
been her lover. Supposing her body had been bound to him so that it
couldn't get away? The struggle had been hard enough when her first flash
came to her; and when she had fought against her knowledge and denied it,
unable to face the truth that did violence to her passion; and when she
had given him up and was left with just that, the beauty of hi