forward.  It was one of Ashley’s most vivid recollections that Vickerson’s movements were like a seal’s.  They had the drollery of a bit of infernal mimicry.  It was also a vivid recollection that when he ran out to the soldier’s aid he had his first sensation of fear.  The bullets whizzed so thick about him that he ran back again.  It was an involuntary running back, as involuntary as snatching his fingers out of a fire.  He could remember standing under the rock, and, as Vickerson did not move, half hoping he were dead.  That would put an end to any further attempts to save him.  But the soldier stirred again, propping himself with both hands and pulling his body onward for a few inches more.  Again Ashley ran out into a tempest of iron and fire and over ground slippery with blood.  He could still feel himself hopping back, as a barefooted boy who has ventured into a snow-storm hops back into the house.  A third time he ran out, and a fourth.  At the fourth he distinctly worded the thought which had been at the back of his mind from the beginning, “I shall get the V.C. for this.”  He tried to banish the unworthy suggestion, but it was too strong for him.  Over the cliffs, and out of the clouds, and from beyond the horizon, he felt the unseen eyes of England upon him, inciting him to such a valor that at the fifth attempt he dragged in his man.

He came out of this reverie, which, after all, was brief, to find the gentle tones in which Olivia had made her astounding revelations still in his ears; while she herself sat expectant, and resigned.  He knew she was expectant and resigned and that she had braced her courage for the worst.  With many men, with most men, to do so would have been needful.  In the confusion of his rapid summaries and calculations it was a pleasurable thought that she should learn from him, and through him and in him, that it was not so with all.  The silence which at first was inadvertent now became deliberate as—­while he noted with satisfaction that he had not overstated to himself the exquisite, restrained beauty of her features, her eyes, her hair, her hands, and of the very texture and fashion of her clothing—­he prolonged the suspense which was to be the prelude to his justifying once again the dowager countess’s good opinion.  It was to his credit as a brave man that he could nerve himself for this with his eyes wide open—­wider open than even Mrs. Fane’s—­to to the consequences that might be in store for him.

XIII

Ashley had the tact, sprung of his English instinct for moderation, not to express his good intentions too directly.  He preferred to let them filter out through a seemingly casual manner of taking them for granted.  Neither did he attempt to disguise the fact that the strangeness incidental to meeting again, in trying conditions and under another sky, created between himself and Olivia a kind of moral distance across which they could draw together only by degrees.  It was a comfort to her that he did not try to bridge it by anything in the way of forced tenderness.  He was willing to talk over the situation simply and quietly until, in the course of an hour or two, the sense of separation began to wear away.