Well, he never married, and she came to keep house for him when the old people were gone. From that far evening to this he never mentioned that he had seen her. She did not marry, for all he knew she had never had to do with a man. Was her trouble over children the effect of ignorance, or the other way about? He did not even pause at the thought that she might afterwards, for the rest of her life, have suffered from a violent distaste, as had Mrs. Lane’s little girl at the time. If he had not been so sleepy he would have smacked his lips as once again he remembered his own wench crying, pretty crying.

He called to mind how disgusted it had made him, the sight of his sister, like a white wood shaving, when she darted, huddled, across the last still stretch of moonlight, intent on her next difficulty, the creep upstairs. (What he did not know was the year after year after year of entanglement before her, the senseless nightingale, the whining dog, repeating the same phrase over and over in the twining briars of her senses.) At that, not interested, he fell asleep.

•

Richard, laid out on the bare floor of a gas-proofed basement, watched Piper settle down. The old man would tell his absent wife, whom he called mother, the next thing he was going to do, and in a loud voice. “Well, mother,” he cried, “I think I’ll take me boots off now.” This he did, and added to the already heavy stench, for the room was unventilated. “I think I’ll try a bit of sleep now, mother, yus, I think I’ll try a bit of sleep now.” How utterly harmless you are, thought Richard, sleepless, and how wrong he was.

Later, when it was his turn to guard the fire engines, or appliances as these are called, drawn up outside in the open, and, lifting wet blankets draped over the door, he came out into a gin-clear air pasted with blue moonlight, at no length his thoughts, for the first time except for that once when Pye had made out that Pye was the only sufferer by his sister’s tricks, turned to those he had left. In a sort of holy falseness he bade them farewell.

There is, he thought, in any manifestation of the firmament by a dead calm at night, a grandeur, the remoteness of anything large that is highly polished. He was looking at what, on this occasion, came so bright that he might have been under a silly, bright plan of the whole geography of the skies.

The fumes of what he had drunk had not lifted from him yet. A Rescue Squad, condemned by their leader to wear full gas clothing night and day, wandered up and down. The complete outfit, because it excludes air, is stifling, and they were too hot to sleep. They had had a bonus paid them. Each carried a bottle of whisky. Richard got his share from one after another as they went by.