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bound him. But as he lay on the grass looking up at her--smiling--obeying her command of silence, his thoughts ranged irrepressibly. Supposing he fell, and she lived on--years and years--to be an old woman? Old! Nelly? Impossible! He put his hand gently on the slender foot, and felt the pulsing life in it. 'Dearest!' she murmured at his touch, and their eyes met tenderly.
'I should be content--' he thought--'if we could just live this life out! I don't believe I should want another life. But to go--and leave her; to go--just at the beginning--before one knows anything--before one has finished anything--'
And again his eyes wandered from her to the suffusion of light and colour on the lake. 'How could anyone ever want anything better than this earth--this life--at its best--if only one were allowed a full and normal share of it!' And he thought again, almost with a leap of exasperation, of those dead and mangled men--out there--in France. Who was responsible--God?--or man? But man's will is--must be--something dependent--something included in God's will. If God really existed, and if He willed war, and sudden death--then there must be another life. Or else the power that devised the world was not a good, but an evil--at best, a blind one.
But while his young brain was racing through the old puzzles in the old ways, Nelly was thinking of something quite different. Her delicate small face kept breaking into little smiles with pensive intervals--till at last she broke out--
'Do you remember how I caught you--turning back to look after us--just here--just about here? You had passed that thorn tree--'
He came back to love-making with delight.
'"Caught me!" I like that! As if you weren't looking back too! How else did you know anything about me?'
He had taken his seat beside her on the rock, and her curly black head was nestling against his shoulder. There was no one on the mountain path, no one on the lake. Occasionally from the main road on the opposite shore there was a passing sound of wheels. Otherwise the world was theirs--its abysses of shadow, its 'majesties of light.'
She laughed joyously, not attempting to contradict him. It was on this very path, just two months before the war, that they had first seen each other. She with her father and Bridget were staying at Mrs. Weston's lodgings, because she, Nelly, had had influenza, and the doctor had sent her away for a change. They knew the Lakes well already, as is the way of Manchester folk. Their father, a hard-worked, and often melancholy man, had delighted in them, summer and winter, and his two girls had trudged about the fells with him year after year, and wanted nothing different or better. At least, Nelly had always been content. Bridget had grumbled often, and proposed Blackpool, or Llandudno, or Eastbourne for a change. But their father did not like 'crowds.' They came to the Lakes always before or after the regular season. Mr. Cookson hated the concourse of motorists in August, and never would use one himself. Not even when they went from Ambleside to Keswick. They must always walk, or go by the horse-coach.
Nelly presently looked up, and gave a little pull to the corner of her husband's moustache.
'Of course you know you behaved abominably that next day at Wythburn! You kept that whole party waiting while you ran after us. And I hadn't dropped that bag. You knew very well I hadn't dropped it!'
He chuckled.
'It did as well as anything else. I got five minutes' talk with you. I found out where you lodged.'
'Poor papa!'--said Nelly reflectively--'he was so puzzled. "There's that fellow we saw at Wythburn again! Why on earth does he come here to fish? I never saw anybody catch a thing in this bit of the river." Poor papa!'
They were both silent a little. Mr. Cookson had not lived long enough to see Nelly and George Sarratt engaged. The war had killed him. Financial embarrassment was already closing on him when it broke out, and he could not stand the shock and the general dislocation of the first weeks, as sounder men could. The terror of ruin broke him down--and he was dead before Christmas, nominally of bronchitis and heart failure. Nelly had worn mourning for him up to her wedding day. She had been very sorry for 'poor papa'--and very fond of him; whereas Bridget had been rather hard on him always. For really he had done his best. After all he had left them just enough to live upon. Nelly's conscience, grown tenderer than of old under the touch of joy, pricked her as she thought of her father. She knew he had loved her best of his two daughters. She would always remember his last lingering hand-clasp, always be thankful