The Boy with Wings Part 53

This was the hardest thing he'd ever yet had to bear; harder than lying out wounded in that wet beetroot-field for nine hours before he could be picked up; harder than the pain, the agonising, jolting journeys; harder even than the sleepless nights when he had tossed and turned on his bed, next to the bed where a delirious man who had won the D.S.O. cried out in his nightmare unceasingly: "Stick it, boys! Stick it, boys! Stick it, boys!" He (Monty) didn't think he could stick this. There could never be any one in the world but Leslie for him, that laughing, devil-may-care Leslie at whom "nice" girls looked askance. Leslie who didn't care.

Leslie who _pitied_ him! Ghastly! Desperately he wished she'd get up and go--_go_----

Suddenly her voice sounded in his ear. Far from being pitying it was so petulant as to convince even him. It cried: "Monty! I said then that you were an infant-in-arms! If you weren't an infant you could _see_!"

He turned his head quickly on the couch-cushion. But even then he didn't really see. Even then he scarcely took in, for the moment, what he heard.

For the kneeling, radiant girl had to go on, laughing shakily: "I always liked you.... After everything I said! After everything I've thought, it comes round to this. _It's better to have loved and settled down than never to have loved at all.... Oh!_ I've got my head into as bright a rainbow as any of them!..." scolded Leslie, laughing again as flutteringly as Paul ampier's sweetheart might have done. "Oh, I thought that just because one liked a man in the kind of way I liked you, it was no reason to accept him ... _fool_ that I was----"

"Leslie!" he cried very sharply, scarcely believing his ears. "Could you have?--_could_ you? And you tell me _now_! When it's too late----"

"Too _late_? _Won't_ you have me? Can't you see that I think you so much more of a man when you're getting about as well as you can on one leg than I did when you were just dancing and fooling about on two? As for me----"

She turned her bright face away.

"It's the same old miracle that never stops happening. I shan't even be a woman, ever," faltered Leslie Long, "unless you help to make me one!"

"You can't mean it? You can't----"

"Can't I? I am 'in the mood' _now_, Monty!" she said, very softly.

"Believe me!"

And her long arm was flung, gently and carefully, about her soldier's neck; her lips were close to his.

When at last she left her lover, Leslie Long walked down the darkened streets near Victoria, quietly and meditatively. And her thoughts were only partly with the man whom she had left so happy. Partly they were claimed by the girl-friend whose marriage morning wish had been for her, Leslie, to be happy in the same way.

It seemed to Leslie that she was very near her now.

Even as she walked along the tall girl was conscious, in a way not to be described, of a Presence that seemed to follow her and to beset her and to surround her with a sense of loving, laughing, girlish pleasure and fellowship. She saw, _without seeing_, the small, eager, tip-tilted face with bright eyes of river-green and brown, crowned by the wreath of short, thick curls. _Without hearing_, she caught the tone of the soft, un-English, delighted voice that cried, "Oh, _Les_--lie----!"

"Little Taffy! She'd be so full of it, of course.... Of _course_ she'd be glad! Of _course_ she'd know; I can't think she doesn't. Not she, who was so much in love herself," mused Leslie, putting up her hand with her characteristic gesture to tuck in the stray tress of black hair that had come loose under her trim velvet cap.

"And the people we've loved can't forget at once, as soon as they've left us. I don't believe that. _She knows._ If _I_ could only say something--send some sort of message! Even if it were only like waving a hand! If _I_ could make some sign that I shall always care----"

As she thought of it she was pa.s.sing a row of shops. The subdued light from one of them fell upon swinging garlands of greenery festooned outside; decorations ready for Christmas.

On an impulse Leslie Long turned into this florist's shop. "I want one of those wreaths you have, please," she said.

"Yes, Madam; a holly-wreath?"

"No. One of those. Laurel."

And while the man fetched down the wreath of broad, dark, pointed leaves, Leslie Long took out one of her cards and a pencil, and scribbled the message that she presently fastened to the wreath. She would not have it wrapped up in paper, but carried it as it was. Then she turned down a side-street to the Embankment, near Vauxhall Bridge.

She leaned over the parapet and saw the black, full tide, here and there only jewelled with lights, flowing on, on, past the spanning bridges and the town, away to the sea that had been at last the great, silver, restless resting-place for such young and ardent hearts....

There was a soft splash as she flung the laurel wreath into the flowing water.

Leslie glanced over and watched it carried swiftly past. In a patch of light she saw the tiny white gleam of the card that was tied to the leaves of victory.

This was what she had written upon it:

"For Gwenna and Paul.

'_Envy, ah, even to tears!

The fortune of their years, Which, though so few, yet so divinely ended._'"

THE END