He steered her very quickly and carefully across the street, then led her with his arm in hers, pressing her back to the dark shelter of the houses. They heard the barking of machine guns from the battlefield at the top and the rattle of the bullets on the causeway. These sounds seemed to her to have no significance. As if they had existed only in some unique relation to John Conway, his death robbed them of vitality. The door of the house opened a little way; they slipped into the long narrow room lighted by a few oil lamps at one end. At the other John's body lay on a stretcher set up on a trestle table, his feet turned outwards to the door, ready. The corners at this end were so dark that the body seemed to stretch across the whole width of the room. A soldier came forward with a lighted candle and gave it to McClane. And she saw John's face; the bridge of his nose, with its winged nostrils lifted. His head was tilted upwards at the chin; that gave it a noble look. His mouth was open, ever so slightly open ... McClane shifted the light so that it fell on his forehead.... Black eyebrows curling up like little moustaches.... The half-dropped eyelids guarded the dead eyes. She thought of how he used to dream. All his dream was in his dead face; his dead face was cold and beautiful like his dream. As she looked at him her breast closed down on her heart as though it would never lift again; her breath shuddered there under her tightened throat. She could feel McClane's hand pressing heavily on her shoulder. She had no strength to shake it off; she was even glad of it. She felt small and weak and afraid; afraid, not of the beautiful thing that lay there, but of something terrible and secret that it hid, something that any minute she would have to know about. "Where was he hit?" "In the back." She trembled and McClane's hand pressed closer. "The bullet passed clean through his heart. He didn't suffer." "He was getting in Germans?" "I don't--quite--know--" McClane measured his words out one by one, "what--he was doing. Sutton was with him. He knows." "Where _is_ Billy?" "Over there. Do you want him?" "Not yet." A soldier brought a chair for her. She sat down with her back to the trestle table. At the lighted end of the room she saw Sutton stooping over a young Belgian captain, buttoning his tunic under the sling he had adjusted. The captain's face showed pure and handsome, like a girl's, like a young nun's, bound round and chin-wrapped in the white bandages. He sat on the floor in front of Sutton's table with his legs stretched out flat. His back was propped against the thigh of a Belgian soldier seated on an upturned barrel. Her hurt eyes saw them very plain and with detail in the light of Sutton's lamp.