He told her that he’d been very happy all his life, even during the war. His mother had died when he was too little to remember her, and his father had married again. He was friends with his stepmother. She and his father had two jolly little kids. He had heaps of friends. A good many of them had gone west in the war. His writing, Bill Patch said, was a frightfully real thing in its way, but it actually only took a bit of him to do it--he looked on it as a sort of trick. He thought perhaps his subconscious self did most of it, and that was why he could write so easily, and didn’t mind old Carey chatting about poisoners all the time, or people talking in the room, or anything. He knew it was a form of self-expression, for some people, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t, in fact, think he needed a form of self-expression. He had always, he said again, been very happy. And all the time he had known that he was waiting for something, and that it was something very great. But he hadn’t known at all what it would be. Sometimes I have wondered what Mrs. Harter made of it all, as she listened to him. He was so much younger than she, in experience, and in knowledge, and most of all in spirit. Mrs. Harter was, one might say, temperamentally sophisticated, and Bill Patch, who was two years her junior, was most essentially childlike. It is the only adjective I can think of that comes anywhere near to describing that quality in him that had made him, all his life, always happy. There had never been any woman at all, “to count” he said. He had gone straight from school into the Army, and he hadn’t thought about girls much, although he greatly admired the pretty ones. Always he came back to it again--he’d had that queer feeling of waiting for something. He didn’t mean _someone_--a person--no, it was more like a job, something that only he could do. It sounded odd, Bill admitted, but there it was. Something to do, in a way, with God. Yes, he believed in God. And Mrs. Harter, who didn’t, and who never had, didn’t say a word. It was Bill Patch who said at last that they ought to go. One supposes that no single one of all the men whom Mrs. Harter had known would have been sufficiently lacking in the technique of that sort of situation, to propose putting an end to it. She wouldn’t have given them the chance, probably saying it herself, with her most disconcerting air of suddenly finding their company not at all worth her while. But when Bill Patch said that it was late, and that he ought to take her home again, Mrs. Harter acquiesced, simply. They must have taken a last look over the five-barred gate at the evening sky, against which the red church tower always stands out with peculiar, clear-cut precision of outline, before they turned away, and went down the long slope of Loman Hill, which lies between high banks where the green almost meets overhead.