In Secret

The girl cupped her hands to receive the rings, watch, the gold whistle in its little gem-set chains, and the sleigh-bell on its bracelet.

She examined them one by one in silence while McKay ran through the pages of the notebook--discoloured pages all warped and stained in their leather binding but written in pencil with print-like distinction.

"Sir W. Blint," murmured McKay, still busy with the notebook. "Can't find what W. stood for."

"That's all there is--just his name and military rank as an aviator: I left the disk where it hung."

The girl placed the trinkets on the moss beside her and looked up into McKay's face.

Both knew they were thinking of the same thing. They wore no disks. Would anybody do for them what McKay had done for the late Sir W. Blint?

McKay bent a little closer over her and looked down into her face. That any living creature should touch this woman in death seemed to him almost more terrible than her dying. It was terror of that which sometimes haunted him; no other form of fear.

What she read in his eyes is not clear--was not quite clear to her, perhaps. She said under her breath: "You must not fear for me, Kay.... Nothing can really touch me now."

He did not understand what she meant by this immunity--gathering some vague idea that she had spoken in the spiritual sense. And he was only partly right. For when a girl is beginning to give her soul to a man, the process is not wholly spiritual.

As he looked down at her in silence he saw her gaze shift and her eyes fix themselves on something above the tree-tops overhead.

"There's that eagle again," she said, "wheeling up there in the blue."

He looked up; then he turned his sun-dazzled eyes on the pages of the little notebook which he held open in both hands.

"It's amusing reading," he said. "The late Sir W. Blint seems to have been something of a naturalist. Wherever he was stationed the lives of the birds, animals, insects and plants interested him. ... Everywhere one comes across his pencilled queries and comments concerning such things; here he discovers a moth unfamiliar to him, there a bird he does not recognise. He was a quaint chap--"

McKay's voice ceased but his eyes still followed the pencilled lines of the late Sir W. Blint. And Evelyn Erith, resting her yellow head against his knees, looked up at him.

"For example," resumed McKay, and read aloud from the diary: "Five days' leave. Blighty. All top hole at home. Walked with Constance in the park.