She seemed to be asking what the white bed and the shrouded figure upon it might mean--protesting that these were not her symbols, or a language that she knew.
Yet at times, as the light varied, she seemed to take another aspect.

To Aubrey, sitting beside his brother, the Nike more than once suggested the recollection of a broken Virgin hanging from a fragment of a ruined church which he remembered on a bit of road near Mametz, at which he had seen passing soldiers look stealthily and long.

Her piteous arms, empty of the babe, suggested motherhood to boys fresh from home; and there were moments when this hovering Nike seemed to breathe a mysterious tenderness like hers--became a proud and splendid angel of consolation--only, indeed, to resume, with some fresh change in the shadows, its pagan indifference, its exultant loneliness.
The Squire sat by the fire, staring into the redness of the logs.
Occasionally nurse or doctor would come and whisper to him.

He scarcely seemed to hear them.

What was the good of talking?
He knew that Desmond was doomed--that his boy's noble body was shattered--and the end could only be a question of days--possibly a week.