The others walked, and had tea, and walked again, and took a train back. Londoners like this sort of day. They like to see hedges, and grass, and pick berries, and hear birds. It refreshes them for their next week's work, even though they have been at the time cold, and tired, and perhaps bored. CHAPTER X EVENING IN CHURCH 1 Alix was huddled on her bed in a rug. She had taken two aspirin tablets because her head ached, and really one is enough. She felt cold and low. She was occupied in not thinking about Paul or the war; it was rather a difficult operation, and took her whole energies. Paul was insistent; she pressed her hands against her eyes and saw him on the darkness, her little brother, white-faced, with the nervous smile she knew; Paul in a trench, among the wounded and killed, seeing things, hearing things ... taken suddenly sick ... unable to leave off ... putting his head above the parapet, trying to get hit, called sharply to order by superiors.... Paul desperate, at the end of his tether, in the night full of flashes and smashes and laughter and grumbling and curses.... Paul laughing too, and talking, as she and Paul always did when they were hiding things.... Paul in his dug-out, alone ... unseen, he supposed ... with only one thought, to get out of it somehow.... The shot, the pain, like flame ... the men approaching, who knew.... Paul's face, knowing they knew ... white, frightened, staring, pain swallowed up in shame ... the end ... how soon? Ingram hadn't said that. Anyhow, the end; and Paul, out of it at last, slipping into the dark, alone.... A noble end, Mrs. Frampton had said, not a wasted life.... Anyhow, all over for Paul, as Terry had said. And then what? Ingram hadn't said that either; nor had Terry; no one could say, for no one knew. What, if anything, _did_ come then? Darkness, nothingness, or something new? 'He has begun to live now, dear, for ever and ever,' Kate had said. 'World without end, amen,' Mrs. Frampton had rounded it off. World without end! What a thought! Poor Paul, finding a desperate way out from the world, slipping away into another which had no way out at all. But Mrs. Frampton's and Kate's world without end was a happy, jolly one, presumably, and the more of it the better. It would give Paul space for the life he hadn't lived here. Oh, could that be so? Was it possible, or was it, as so many people thought, only a dream? Who could know? No one, till they came to try. And then perhaps they would know nothing at all either way, not being there any more....