“Billy—!  What made you come?”

“Conway.  He’s in a frantic funk.  Said he’d lost you.  He thought you’d gone on with me.”

How awful it would be if Billy knew.

“It was my fault,” she lied.  “He told me to go on with you.”  She could hear him telling her to wait for him in the stable yard.

“I’d have come before only I didn’t see him soon enough.  I had an operation....  Is that a wounded man you’ve got there?  I suppose he lost him, too?”

“He didn’t know he was here.”

“I see.”

Then she remembered.  Billy would know.  Billy would tell her.

“Billy—­was that boy dead when you left him!  The boy in the house over there.”

He was stooping to the Belgian, examining his bandages, and he didn’t answer all at once.  He seemed to be meditating.

“Was he?” she repeated.

It struck her that Billy was surprised.

“Because—­” She stopped there.  She couldn’t say to him, “I want to know whether John left him dead or alive.”

“He was dead all right.”  Sutton’s voice came up slow and muffled out of his meditation.

It was all right.  She might have known.  She might have known.  Vaguely for a moment she wondered why Billy had come for her and not John; then she was frightened.

“Billy—­John isn’t hurt, is he?”

“No.  Rather not.  A bit done up.  I made him go and lie down....  Look here, we must get out of this.”

* * * * *

The McClane Corps were gathered on their side of the messroom.  They greeted her with shouts of joy, but their eyes looked at her queerly, as if they knew something dreadful had happened to her.

“You should have stood in with us, Charlotte,” Mrs. Rankin was saying.  “Then you wouldn’t get mislaid among the shells.”  She was whispering.  “Dr. McClane, if you took Charlotte out among the shells, would you run away and leave her there?”

“I’d try not to.”

Oh yes.  He wouldn’t run away and leave her.  But he wouldn’t care where he took her.  He wouldn’t care whether a shell got her or not.  But John cared.  If only she knew why....  Their queer faces sobered her and suddenly she knew.  She saw Sutton coming out of the house with the narrow shutters; she heard him shouting to her, “Come on, Charlotte, hurry up!”

John must have heard him.  He must really have thought that she had gone with him.

But he must have known, too, that she wouldn’t go.  He must have known that if he told her to wait for him she would wait.  So that—­

The voices of the McClane women ceased abruptly.  One of them turned round.  Charlotte saw John standing between the glasses of the two doors.  He came in and she heard Mrs. Rankin calling out in her hard, insolent voice, “Well, Mr. Conway, so you’ve got in safe.”