right underneath it." Isobel gave no answer, unless a sound something between a gulp and a sob can be so described. Depths seemed to be stirring in her nature that she had not hitherto been conscious of possessing. She[Pg 75] felt mean and small and bitterly humbled. She had desired to see the front out of mere heedless curiosity, as a child might wish to visit a slaughter-house. She had had her desire, and her eyes had seen unimaginable horrors—horrors which had become so much a commonplace to the men who passed their lives in this shambles that they apologized for its lack of greater horrors. Compared with what they had seen, there was "nothing much" here for her curious eye. Only a strip of ground fought over a month before—its dead buried, its wounded carried away to a smiling land where such as she were flattered and praised in the public press because out of their useless lives they deigned to devote an occasional hour to those same wounded. [Pg 75] A sudden horror came over her lest she should see a dead man. She covered her eyes with her hands and gave a convulsive shudder. "Don't—don't take me over there!" she said, and climbed down the steps again into the trench. Bill and Alf, much concerned to understand what could possibly have upset their visitor, were on the point of following, when there was a sound of squelching mud, and a figure appeared round the angle of the trench. "Lumme!" said Bill's voice in an appalled whisper. "The orficer!" With one accord the two Tommies turned and fled as their platoon commander approached. Lieutenant Allen had been tramping about all the[Pg 76] afternoon, reconnoitering the approaches to the front line in case of trouble. Muddy and hungry and dog-tired, he was now plodding mechanically back to his hole in the ground, while his thoughts wandered vaguely and wistfully to home and his people—and Isobel. At the sound of Bill's whisper he looked up and stopped dead. Clearly his nerves must be beginning to give way, for he seemed to see the subject of his thoughts standing before him in the trench. [Pg 76] "My God!" he exclaimed—"Isobel!" She stared at the muddy figure before her for a long moment. Then recognition dawned slowly in her eyes. "You!" she said at last, and her voice seemed to Allen to hold in it all that he
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