And always her letters breathed to Sabre his own passionate love of England, his own poignant sense of possession in her and by her, his own intolerable aching at the heart at his envisagement of her enormously beset. They reflected his own frightful oppression and they assuaged it, as his letters, she told him, assuaged hers, as burdens are assuaged by mingling of distress. "There is no good news," he told her, "and for me who can do nothing--and sometimes things are a little difficult with me here and I suppose that makes it worse--there seems to be no way out. But your letters are more than good news and more than rescue; they are courage. Courage is like love, Nona: it touches the spirit; and the spirit, amazing essence, is like a spring: it is never touched but it--springs!" She was working daily at a canteen at Victoria station. She had been on the night shift "but I can't sleep, I simply cannot sleep nowadays"; and so, shortly before he wrote to her of his second rejection, she had changed on to the day shift and at night took out the car to run arriving men from one terminus to another. "And about twice a week I get dog-tired and feel sleepy and send the chauffeur with the car and stay at home and do sleep. It's splendid!" Northrepps had been handed over to the Red Cross as a military hospital. Her answer to his letter telling of his second rejection at the recruiting office--most tender words from her heart to his heart, comforting his spirit as transfusion of blood from health to sickness maintains the exhausted body--her reply told him that on that day fortnight she was coming down to say of his disappointment what she could so inadequately express in writing. She was going out to war work in France--in Tony's name she had presented a fleet of ambulance cars to a Red Cross unit and she was going out to drive one--and she was coming down to look at things at Northrepps before she left. * * * * * On the following day Tidborough, opening its newspapers, shook hands with itself in all its houses, shops and offices on its own special and most glorious V.C.,--Lord Tybar. III Tybar's V.C. was the first thing Sabre spoke of to Nona when, a fortnight later, she came down and he went up to her at Northrepps in the afternoon. Its brilliant gallantry, rendered so vivid to him by the intimacy with which he could see that thrice attractive figure engaged in its performance, stirred him most deeply. He had by heart every line of its official record in the restrained language of the _Gazette_.