“And shouldn’t it be?” She watched him as he touched the black ribbons. “Is it wrong? You’re the one best positioned to judge that.”

“No. Of course. She wasn’t wrong. It just surprises me to see that she was so sure. That she felt he was so definitely dead.”

“She ran out of hope. I wish you could have come to her funeral. I wish you could have got leave for that.”

“It was too late by the time they told me. You know that. I would have been here if I could.”

“It didn’t seem fair that none of you were here. Fair to her, I mean. That there wasn’t one of you to see her go into the ground.”

He turned Francis’s picture in his hands, as if he expected to find something on the reverse, and then placed it back on the mantelpiece. “This is Francis’s house now, I suppose,” he said.

“Only it’s not, is it?” she replied, then paused. “I didn’t know whether I was meant to put black ribbons on you too.”

“I’m sorry. I should have written, shouldn’t I?”

“You’ve got heather in your buttonhole.”

“A woman pressed it on me in town.”

She looked at the man Harry had become. She could see Francis’s 1914 face in Harry’s mirrored features, that man who had packed a bag and told her that he would be back by the next spring. Except six springs had passed and Francis hadn’t come back. When she looked at Harry’s reflection, she saw glimmers of the golden boy who had whispered lines of poetry at her through library shelves, but Harry’s eyes connected with hers then and he was resolutely himself again. When she looked at Harry’s face she could still see traces of the young man who had so wanted to go to art college, and who spent his Saturday afternoons drawing her face. Except six springs had left a sadness on Harry’s face. Those were still his gentle green eyes, that still his patient smile, but there was also a melancholy there now, casting a different shadow over his features.

“Heather for luck,” she said. “Is that why I don’t need to bring home a black ribbon for you?”

“I’m not sure that I believe in luck.”

SHE WATCHED AS he washed his hands and face at the sink, saw his eyes looking all around his mother’s kitchen.

“I am permitted to make a fool of myself because I might die tomorrow,” Harry had said to her in August 1917, as they had stood together on the driveway of the hospital. He had put his hand on the sleeve of her green velvet coat. Two months later Francis was gone. She noticed, as Harry turned now, how he stared at her green coat on the back of the chair. Was he remembering that moment too?