He swore she was the only one he’d ever cared for. Where are the others now? thought Mary. And when this War is over, can we start again? Will you take me back? Yes, he asked that. She felt so much older than he was, old enough to be his mother. His mother, who’d written several times from Cork, very bitterly. She believed that Mary was the seducer, the betrayer of her son. He’d broken her heart. “No, darling,” Mary told him—she shook her head, smiling, “I’d never have you back. Not if you paid me.” She loved him better than ever at that moment, but differently. Love made her cunning. She would keep what she’d got—no more gambling. He was astonished, deeply injured innocent. He wasn’t used to being treated like that by women. They parted quite good friends. And he was killed almost at once. She cried all day, but she wouldn’t put on black. She wondered if the others had seen the name on the lists. It was never referred to. But perhaps Lily had gone through long indecisions wondering whether it would be proper for her to write and condole. Mary grinned. Lily was up at the Hall by then. She’d gone to live there almost as soon as the War broke out.

“There is one name, of all the names written here”—the Bishop made a backward, slight, somehow deprecatory gesture—“which I might specially recall to you. It is the name of a boy. Perhaps some of you here will, in a few years, be telling your sons: That boy was your own age when he died fighting that you might grow up in a safe happy home. Yes, that boy was not yet sixteen when he was killed at Ypres. I hope that his name will never be forgotten in this village.”

Mary didn’t know it, but thought vaguely that he must be one of the Pratts from School Green. She seemed to remember having heard at the time. Meanwhile she felt someone pushing through the crowd just behind her. It was Ramsbotham—Ram’s B, as the children called him—carrying the wreath. He took his station just behind Lily. He was crimson in the face.

It was all extraordinarily comic. But Mary could hardly believe that Lily had ever given him the slightest encouragement. He’d been at the Flower Show and the Sunday School Sports—where she hadn’t, after all, turned up—and at the sale of work. It was getting talked about. Higham had remarked to Mary only the other morning: “Mr. Ramsbotham takes a lot of interest in Chapel Bridge affairs.”