'I am going up to town myself to-morrow. I shall come and see if I can do anything for you.'
'Thank you,' said Nelly mechanically. 'Oh yes, I shall have thought of many things by then. Good-bye.'
Marsworth and Farrell were left to watch the disappearance of the car along the moonlit road.
'Poor little soul!' said Farrell--'poor little soul!' He walked on along the road, his eyes on the ground. Marsworth offered him a cigar, and they smoked in silence.
'What'll the next message be?' said Farrell, after a little while. '"Reported wounded and missing--now reported killed"? Most probable!'
It was a pale September day. In the country, among English woods and heaths the sun was still strong, and trees and bracken, withered heath, and reddening berries, burned and sparkled beneath it. But in the dingy bedroom of a dingy Bloomsbury hotel, with a film of fog over everything outside, there was no sun to be seen; the plane trees beyond the windows were nearly leafless; and the dead leaves scudding and whirling along the dusty, airless streets, under a light wind, gave the last dreary touch to the scene that Nelly Sarratt was looking at. She was standing at a window, listlessly staring at some houses opposite, and the unlovely strip of garden which lay between her and the houses. Bridget Cookson was sitting at a table a little way behind her, mending some gloves.
The sisters had been four days in London. For Nelly, life was just bearable up to five or six o'clock in the evening because of her morning and afternoon visits to the Enquiry Office in D---- Street, where everything that brains and pity could suggest was being done to trace the 'missing'; where sat also that kind, tired woman, at the table which Nelly by now knew so well, with her pitying eyes, and her soft voice, which never grew perfunctory or careless. 'I'm _so_ sorry!--but there's no fresh news.' That had been the evening message; and now the day's hope was over, and the long night had to be got through.
That morning, however, there had been news--a letter from Sarratt's Colonel, enclosing letters from two privates, who had seen Sarratt go over the parapet in the great rush, and one of whom had passed him--wounded--on the ground and tried to stay by him. But 'Lieutenant Sarratt wouldn't allow it.' 'Never mind me, old chap'--one witness reported him as saying. 'Get on. They'll pick me up presently.' And there they had left him, and knew no more.