Michael had long debated this in his mind. It seemed to him that if he came back, as might easily happen, hopelessly crippled, incurably invalid, it would be placing Sylvia in an unfairly difficult position, if she was already his wife. He might be hideously disfigured; she would be bound to but a wreck of a man; he might be utterly unfit to be her husband, and yet she would be tied to him. He had already talked the question over with his father, who, with that curious posthumous anxiety to have a further direct heir, had urged that the marriage should take place at once; but with his own feeling on the subject, as well as Sylvia’s, he at once made up his mind. “I agree with you,” he said. “We will settle it so, then.” She smiled at him. “How dreadfully business-like,” she said, with an attempt at lightness. “I know. It’s rather a good thing one has got to be business-like, when--” That failed also, and he drew her to him and kissed her. CHAPTER XVI Michael was sitting in the kitchen of a French farm-house just outside the village of Laires, some three miles behind the English front. The kitchen door was open, and on the flagged floor was cast an oblong of primrose-coloured November sunshine, warm and pleasant, so that the bluebottle flies buzzed hopefully about it, settling occasionally on the cracked green door, where they cleaned their wings, and generally furbished themselves up, as if the warmth was that of a spring day that promised summer to follow. They were there in considerable numbers, for just outside in the cobbled yard was a heap of manure, where they hungrily congregated. Against the white-washed wall of the house there lay a fat sow, basking contentedly, and snorting in her dreams. The yard, bounded on two sides by the house walls, was shut in on the third by a row of farm-sheds, and the fourth was open. Just outside it stood a small copse half flooded with the brimming water of a sluggish stream that meandered by the side of the farm-road leading out of the yard, which turned to the left, and soon joined the highway. This farm-road was partly under water, though not deeply, so that by skirting along its raised banks it was possible to go dry-shod to the highway underneath which the stream passed in a brick culvert. Through the kitchen window, set opposite the door, could be seen a broad stretch of country of the fenland type, flat and bare, and intersected with dykes, where sedges stirred slightly in the southerly breeze. Here and there were pools of overflowed rivulets, and here and there were plantations of stunted hornbeam, the russet leaves of which still clung thickly to them. But in the main it was a bare and empty land, featureless and stolid.