Do you mind--it is so silly, but after all a woman cannot be as strong as a man, can she ?--would you mind very much just holding my hand for a moment and staying here quite quietly.

I have had a horrible evening, and when I came in, my head felt as though it would burst.

You do not mind ?" Julian smiled as he leaned towards her.

A kind of resentment of which he had been conscious, even though in some measure ashamed of it, resentment at her unswerving loyalty to the task she had set herself, melted away.

He suddenly knew why he had kissed her, on that sunny morning on the marshes, an ecstatic and incomprehensible moment which had seemed sometimes, during these days of excitement, as though it had belonged to another life and another world.