CONTENTS

 

 PART I. WOOD END CHAPTER I. JOHN COMES HOME CHAPTER II. JOHN TALKS CHAPTER III. ALIX GOES PART II. VIOLETTE CHAPTER IV. SATURDAY MORNING AT VIOLETTE CHAPTER V. AFTERNOON OUT CHAPTER VI. EVENING AT VIOLETTE CHAPTER VII. HOSPITAL CHAPTER VIII. BASIL AT VIOLETTE CHAPTER IX. SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY CHAPTER X. EVENING IN CHURCH CHAPTER XI. ALIX AND EVIE CHAPTER XII. ALIX AND BASIL CHAPTER XIII. ALIX, NICHOLAS, AND WEST PART III. DAPHNE CHAPTER XIV. DAPHNE AT VIOLETTE CHAPTER XV. ALIX AT A MEETING CHAPTER XVI. ON PEACE CHAPTER XVII. NEW YEAR'S EVE 

 

PART I

WOOD END

CHAPTER I

JOHN COMES HOME

1

In a green late April evening, among the dusky pine shadows, Alix drew Percival Briggs. Percival stood with his small cleft chin lifted truculently, small blue eyes deep under fair, frowning brows, one scratched brown leg bare to the knee, dirty hands thrust into torn pockets. He was the worst little boy in the wood, and had been till six months ago the worst little boy in the Sunday-school class of Alix's cousin Dorothy. He had not been converted six months ago, but Dorothy, like so many, had renounced Sunday-school to work in a V.A.D. hospital.

Alix, who was drawing Percival, worked neither in a Sunday-school nor in a hospital. She only drew. She drew till the green light became green gloom, lit by a golden star that peered down between the pines. She had a pale, narrow, delicate, irregular sort of face, broad-browed, with a queer, cynical, ironic touch to it, and purple-blue eyes that sometimes opened very wide and sometimes narrowed into slits. When they narrowed she looked as from behind a visor, critical, defensive, or amused; when they opened wide she looked singularly unguarded, as if the bars were up and she, unprotected, might receive the enemy's point straight and clean. Behind her, on the wood path, was a small donkey between the shafts of a small cart. A rough yellow 

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