Behind us I could hear the soldiers breaking the garden-fence to make stakes for their tents.
Here we were for a fortnight and it was strange to me, in the days of stress and excitement that followed, to look back to that fortnight and remember that we had, so many of us, been restless and discontented at the quiet of it.

Oddly enough, of all the many backgrounds that were, during the next months, to follow in procession behind me, there only remain to me with enduring vitality: this school-house at O----, the banks of the River Nestor which I had indeed good reason to remember, and finally the forest of S----.

How strange a contrast, that school-house with its little garden and white cobbles and that forest which will, to the end of my life, ever haunt my dreams.
And yet, by its very contrast, how fitting a background to our Prologue this school-house made! I wonder whether Nikitin sees it still in his visions?
Trenchard and Semyonov ...

does it mean anything to them, where they now are?
First of them all, Marie Ivanovna....

I see her still, bending over the well looking down, then suddenly flinging her head back, laughing as we stood behind her, the sunlight through the apple-trees flashing in her eyes....