It was up there in the same place, later, that he came to know
Clemence. She was just passing, the first time, sumptuous
with sunshine, and so fair that the loose sheaf of straw she carried
in her arms seemed to him nut-brown by contrast. The second time,
she had a friend with her, and they both stopped to watch him. He
heard them whispering, and turned towards them. Seeing themselves
discovered, the two young women made off, with a sibilance of
skirts, and giggles like the cry of a partridge.

And it was there, too, that he and she together set up their home.
Over its front travels a vine, which he coddled under a straw hat,
whatever the season. By the garden gate stands the rose-tree that he
knows so well--it never used its thorns except to try to hold him
back a little as he went by.

Will he return again to it all? Ah, he has looked too deeply into
the profundity of the past not to see the future in appalling
accuracy. He thinks of the regiment, decimated at each shift; of the
big knocks and hard he has had and will have, of sickness, and of
wear--

He gets up and snorts, as though to shake off what was and what will
be. He is back in the middle of the gloom, and is frozen and swept
by the wind, among the scattered and dejected men who blindly await
the evening. He is back in the present, and he is shivering still.

Two paces of his long legs make him butt into a group that is
talking--by way of diversion or consolation--of good cheer.

"At my place," says one, "they make enormous loaves, round ones, big