up.' Dorothy went to sleep. Alix lay and watched the shadows shifting slowly round on the balcony, and listened for sobbing, but heard only the quiet murmur of the pines. 'What they can bear to go through.... But they can't, they can't, they can't ... we can bear to hear about ... but we can't, we can't, we can't....' It was like the intolerable ticking of a clock, and beat itself away at last into a sick dream. On the other side of the wall, John started and sat bolt upright in bed, with wide staring eyes.... John, like many thousand others, would perhaps never sleep quietly through a night again. Yet John had been a composed sleeper once. CHAPTER III ALIX GOES 1 It was Sunday next day. Dorothy and Margot conducted a party of wounded soldiers to matins. Mrs. Orme, who thought it time Mademoiselle Verstigel went to Mass again, sent her over to Wonford, where there was a church of her persuasion. She herself had to go up to town to the Sunday club where soldiers' and sailors' families were kept out of the streets and given coffee, news, friendship, music, and the chance to read good books, a chance of which Mrs. Orme, a sanguine person, hoped undiscouraged that they would one day avail themselves. (Hope, faith, and love were in her family. Her sister, Daphne Sandomir, when in England, held study circles of working women to instruct them in the principles which make for permanent peace, and hoped with the same fervour that they would read the books and pamphlets she gave them.) Mr. Orme and John walked over to the links to play golf. Alix, not having either the church, club, or golf habit, and being unfitted for much walking, sat in the wood, tried to paint, and failed. She felt peevish, tired, cross and selfish, and her head ached, as one's head nearly always does after being sick in the night. The pines were no good: stupid trees, the wrong shape. What sort of pictures would one be painting out there? Mud-coloured levels, mud-coloured men, splashes of green here and there ... and red.... And blue sky, or mud-coloured, with shells winging through it like birds, singing, 'Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd-Lloyd.'... The sort of picture Basil would be painting and the way he would be painting it she knew exactly. Only probably he wasn't painting at all
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