They drove back to the village and down to their isolated villa, and here on the road they passed ones and twos of the Section walking into supper.

"How little we have thought out your evasion!" whispered Stewart at the wheel, as they drew up at the door: "Get out, and go and dress. I will take the car up to the garage and come back."

Fanny slipped in through the garden. What they called "dressing" was a clean skirt and silk stockings—but silk stockings she dared not put on before her brief appearance at supper. Stuffing the little roll into her pocket she determined to change her stockings on the boat.

Soon, before supper was ended, she had risen from the table, unquestioned by the others, had paused a moment to meet Stewart's eye full of mystery and blessing, had closed the door and was gone.

She slipped down the road and across the field to the railway. There was a train standing, glowing and breathing upon the lines, and the driver called to her as she ran round the buffers of the engine. Soon she was down by the riverside and looking for Margot. Though there was moonlight far above her the river banks were wrapped in fog that smelt of water, and Margot's face at the hut window was white, and her wool dress white, too. She came down and they rowed out into the fog, in an upward circle because of the stream. Fanny could just see her companion's little blunt boots, the stretched laces across her instep, and above, her pretty face and slant eyes. Hurriedly, in the boat she pulled off the thick stockings, rolled them up, and drew on the silk. A chill struck her feet. She wrapped the ends of her coat lightly round her knees and as she did so the roll of thick stockings sprang out of her lap and fell overboard into the fog and the river.

"Mademoiselle goes to a party?" said Margot, who had not noticed. The soft sympathetic voice was as full of blessing as Stewart's eyes had been.

"Yes, to a party. And you will fetch me back to-night when I whistle?"

"Yes. Blow three times, for sometimes in the singing at home I lose the sound."

The opposite bank seemed to drift in under the motionless boat, and she sprang out.

"A tout À l'heure, mademoiselle."

At the top of the bank the road ran out into the fog, which was thicker on this side. She walked along it and was lost to Margot's incurious eyes. Here it was utterly deserted: since the bridge had been blown up the road had become disused and only the few who passed over by Margot's boat ever found their way across these fields. She strayed along by the road's edge and could distinguish the blanched form of a tree.

Strange that the fog should reach so much further inland on this side of the river. Perhaps the ground was lower. Standing still her ear caught a rich, high, throaty sound, a choking complaint which travelled in the air.

"It is the car," she thought. Far away a patch of light floated in the sky, like an uprooted searchlight.

"That is the fog, bending the headlights upward."

She stood in the centre of the road and listened to the sound as it drew nearer and nearer, till suddenly the headlights came down out of the sky and pierced her—she stood washed in light, and the car stopped.

Beside the driver of the car was, not Julien, but a man with a red, wooden face like a Hindoo god made out of mahogany. Saluting, he said: "We are sent to fetch you, mademoiselle." He held the door of the closed car open for her, she smiled, nodded, climbed in and sank upon the seat.

"When you get to the lights of the houses, mademoiselle, will you stoop a little and cover yourself with this rug? It is not foggy in Chantilly and the street is very full."

"I will," she said, "I'll kneel down."

Something about his face distressed her. How came it that Julien trusted this new man? Perhaps he was some old and private friend of his who felt antagonistic to her, who disbelieved in her, who would hurt them both with his cynical impassivity.

"I'm fanciful!" she thought. "This is only some friend of his from
Paris." Paris sending forth obstacles already!

In Chantilly she crouched beneath the rug—her expectations closing, unwandering, against her breast. Beams might pierce the glass of the car and light nothing unusual; what burnt beneath was not a fire that man could see. Generals in the street walked indifferently to the Hotel of the Grand CondÉ. It was their dinner hour, and who cared that an empty car should move towards a little inn beyond? Now, she held armfuls of the rug about her, buried from the light, now held her breath, too, as the car stopped.

"Now mademoiselle!"

And there stood Julien, at the end of the passage, he whom she had left, sombre and distracted, a long twenty-four hours ago in Chantilly. She saw the change even while she flew to him. He was gay, he was excited, he was exciting. He was beautiful, admirable, he admired her.

"Fanny, is it true? You have come?" and "Que vous Êtes en beautÉ!"

Within, a table was laid for three—three chairs, three plates, three covers. He saw her looking at this.

"We dine three to-night. You must condescend to dine with a sergeant.
My old friend—Where is Alfred?"

"I am here."

"My old friend—four years before the war. The oldest friend I have.
He has heard—"

("——Of Violette. He has heard of Violette! He is Violette's friend; he is against me!")

"I am so glad," she said aloud, in a small voice, and put out her hand. She did not like him, she had an instant dread of him, and thought he beheld it too.

"I did not even know he was here," said Julien, more gay than ever. "But he is the sergeant of the garage, and I find him again.

"What a help you'll be, to say the least of it! You will drive her to the river, you will fetch her from the river! I myself cannot drive, I am not allowed."

The impassive man thus addressed looked neither gay nor sad. His little eyes wandered to Fanny with a faint critical indifference. ("Julien has made a mistake, a mistake! He is an enemy!") She could not clearly decide how much she should allow her evening to be shadowed by this man, how deeply she distrusted him. But Julien was far from distrusting him. Through the dinner he seemed silently to brag to Alfred. His look said, and his smile said: "Is she not this and that, Alfred? Is she not perfect?" His blue eyes were bright, and once he said, "Go on, talk, Fanny, talk, Fanny, you have an audience. To-night you have two to dazzle!" Impossible to dazzle Alfred. Could he not see that? One might as easily dazzle a mahogany god, a little god alive beneath its casing with a cold and angry life. Yet though at first she was silent, inclined to listen to Alfred, to hope that something in his tones would soothe her enemy fears, soon she could not help following Julien's mood. Should she want to be praised, she had it from his eye—or be assured of love, it was there, too, in the eye, the smile, the soft tone. Because of Alfred, he could put nothing into words—because he must be dumb she could read a more satisfying conversation in his face.

She began to think the occasional presence of a third person was an addition, an exciting disturbance, a medium through which she could talk with ease two languages at once, French to Alfred, and love to Julien.

When they had finished dining Alfred left them, promising to come back with the car in half an hour, to take Fanny to the river.

"You must like him!" said Julien confidently, when the door had closed.
Fanny said she would. "And do you like him?" Fanny said she did.

"I met him so many years ago. He was suffering very much at the time through a woman. Now he will tell you he has become a cynic."

"Did she treat him badly?"

"She ran away from him, taking his carriage and his two horses—"

"A beautiful woman?" interrupted Fanny, who liked details.

"She might equally well have been magnificent or monstrous. She was over life-size, and Alfred, who is small, adored her. Everything about her was emphatic. Her hair was heavy-black, her skin too red. And never still, never in one place. Alfred had a house outside Paris, and carriage and horses to take him to the station. One night she took the horses, put them into the carriage and was seen by a villager seated upon the coachman's box driving along the road. When she had passed him this man saw her stop and take up a dark figure who climbed to the seat beside her. They—the woman and her probable lover, who never once had been suspected, and never since been heard of—drove as far as Persan- Beaumont, near here, where they had an accident, and turned the carriage into the ditch, killing one of the horses. The other they took out and coolly tied to the station railings. They took the train and disappeared, and though she had lived with Alfred two years, she never left a note for him to tell him that she had gone, she never wired to him about the roses, she never has written one since."

"Enough to turn him into a cynic!"

"Not at first. He came to me, spent the night in my flat; he was distracted. We must have walked together a mile across my little floor. He couldn't believe she was gone, which was natural. And though next morning the horses were missing and the coach-house empty, he couldn't be got to connect the two disappearances. He rang me up from the country where he went next day, saying earnestly as though to convince himself, 'You know I've got on to the Paris police about those horses.' And later in the day, again: 'I hear there has been a good deal of horse-stealing all over the country.' Then, when the horses were found, one dead, and the other tied to the station railings, he believed at once that she had taken them and wouldn't talk one word more upon the subject. He sold the remaining horse."

"It was then he grew cool about women!"

"Not yet. It was then that he met, almost at once, a young girl who insisted in the most amazing fashion, that she loved him. He could not understand it. He came to me and said: 'Why does she love me?'

"I thought she was merely intriguing to marry him, but no, he said:
'There's something sincere and impressive in her tone; she loves me.
What shall I do?'

'Why shouldn't you marry her?' I said.

And then he was all at once taken with the idea to such a degree that he became terrified when he was with her. 'Suppose she refuses me,' he said twenty times a day. 'Ask her. It's simple.' 'It's staking too much. You say, "Ask her," when all in a minute she may say no.'

"He got quite ill over it. The girl's mother asked him to the house, the girl herself, though she saw him less and less alone, smiled at him as tenderly as ever. And then there came a day when he left me full of courage, and going to her house he asked her to marry him. He met her alone by chance, and before asking her mother he spoke to the girl herself. She said no, point-blank. She said 'Nothing would induce her to.' He was so astonished that he didn't stay a second longer in the house. He didn't even come to me, but went back into the country, and then to England."

"But why did the girl—?"

"There is nothing to ask. Or, at any rate, there is no answer to anything. I suppose he asked himself every question about her conduct, but it was inexplicable."

"He should have asked her twice."

"It never occurred to him. And he has told me lately that she refused him with such considered firmness that it seemed unlikely that it was a whim."

"Well—poor Alfred! And yet it was only the merest chance, the merest run of bad luck—but it leaves him, you say, with the impression that we are flawed?"

"A terrible flaw. His opinion is that there is a deep coldness in women. In the brain, too, he feels them mortally unsound. Mad and cold he says now of all women, and therefore as unlike a normal man as a creature half-lunatic, half-snake."

"He thinks that of all women, young or old?"

"Yes, I think so. He tells me that whereas most men make the mistake of putting down womanly unreason to the score of their having too much heart, he puts it down to their having no heart at all, which he says is so mad a state that they are unrecognisable as human creatures."

"But—(alas, poor Alfred)—you have made a charming confidante for us!"

"Confidante? He will make the best. He is devoted to me."

"To me?"

"To anything, to any one I care for."

"Not to me. What you have told me is the key to his expression when he looks at me. If he is devoted to you it is not an unreasoning devotion, and he is judging me poisonous to you. As he has himself been hurt, he will not have you hurt. I wish he had never come. I wish he might never be my driver to the river, and your friend, and our enemy."

"Fanny!"

"I wish it. I am unhappy about him, and unhappiness is always punished. While we were in Metz every one smiled at us; here every one will spy us out, scold, frown, punish—"

"And your magic luck?"

"Alfred threatens my luck," she said. Then, with another look, "Are you angry with me? Can you love such a character?"

"I love it now."

"You have never heard me when I scold, or cry or am sulky?…"

"Never."

"But if I make the experiment?"

"I could make a hundred experiments, but I make none of them. We cannot know what to-morrow may bring."

This she remembered suddenly with all her heart.

"Come nearer to me, Fanny. Why are you sitting so far away?"

She sat down nearer to him; she put all her fingers tightly round his wrist.

"I am not always sure that you are there, Julien; that you exist."

"Yet I am substantial enough."

"No, you are most phantom-like. It is the thought of parting that checks my earnestness; as though I had an impulse to save myself. It is the thought of parting that turns you into a ghost, already parted with; that sheds a light of unreality over you when I am distant. Something in me makes ready for that parting, flees from you, and I cannot stay it, steals itself, and I cannot break through it. I have known you so short a time. I have had nothing but pleasure from you; isn't it possible that I can escape without pain?"

"Is it?"

"No, no, no!" She laid her cheek upon his hand. "Do something to make it easier. Must it be that when you go you go completely? Promise me at least that it will be gradual, that you will try to see me when you have taken up your other life."

"But if I can't? If you are ordered back to Metz?"

"Why should I be? But, if I am, promise me that you will try. If it is only an artifice, beguile me with it; I will believe in any promise."

"You don't need to ask me to promise; you know you don't need to make me promise. Wherever you are sent I will try to come. Wherever—do you hear? Do you think that that 'other' life is a dragon to eat me up? That it will be such bliss to me that I shall forget you completely? It isn't to be bliss, but work, hard work, and competition. It is the work that will keep me to Paris, not my happiness, my gaiety, my content with other faces. That would comfort me if I were listener, and you the speaker. But, Fanny, Fanny, I never met any one with such joy as you—it is you who change the forest and the inns we meet in, make the journeys a miracle. Don't show me another face. We have been in love without a cloud, without scenes, without tears. You have laughed at everything. Don't change, don't show me someone whom I don't know; not that sad face!"

"This then!" She held up a face in whose eyes and smile was the hasty radiance his fervour had brought her—and at sight of it the words broke from him—"Are you happy so quickly?"

"Yes, yes, already happy."

"Because I speak aloud of what I feel? What a doubting heart you have within you! And I believe you only pretend to distress yourself, that you may test whether I am sensitive enough to show the reflection of it. Come! Well—am I right?"

"Partly. But I need not think. Oh, I am glad your feeling is so like mine, and mine like yours! I will let the parting take care of itself —yet there is one thing about which I cannot tell. What does your heart do in absence, what kind of man are you when there is no one but Alfred, who will say: 'Forget her'?"

"What kind do you think?"

"While I am here beside you, you cannot even imagine how dim I might become. Can I tell? Can you assure me?"

Dim she might become to him, but dim she was not now as she besought him with eyes that showed a quick and eager heart, eyes fixed on his face full of enquiry, sure of its answer, feigning doubt that did not distress her.

"And I to you, and I to you?" he said, speaking in her ear when he had made her an answer. "Dim, too? Why do we never talk of your inconstancy? We must discuss it."

"Inconstancy! That word had not occurred to me. It was your forgetfulness that I dreaded."

"I shall not be unforgetful until I am inconstant."

"Julien!"

"My love!"

"You can afford to tease me now you have me in such a mood!"

"In such a mood! Have I, indeed? Yet you will forget me before I forget you."

"You tell me to my face that I shall change?" she asked.

"Yes. And since you are bound to forget me, I insist at least that there shall be a reason for doing so. I would rather be a king dethroned than allowed to lapse like a poor idiot."

"You would? You can say that?" Her voice rose.

"One instant, Fanny. Even when my teasing is out of taste, learn to distinguish it from what I say in earnest. My dear, my dear, why should you have to listen to the matter of my philosophy and my experience which tells me all creatures forget and are forgotten! No! I wipe out! You will not vanish—"

The door opened and Alfred entered the room.

"The car is ready," he said. "I have had trouble in getting here."

Fanny turned to him. "I am ready," she said. "It is dreadful to have to trouble you to take me so late at night to the river."

"No, no—" Alfred, glowing from the exercise in the snowy night outside, was inclined to be more friendly, or at least less sparing of his words. "Here are some letters that were at your lodging." He handed three to Julien.

"When do you dine with me again?" Julien, holding the letters, placed his hand upon her shoulder.

"I cannot tell what the work will be. Perhaps little, as the snow is deep."

"It is snowing again outside," said Alfred.

"Then the snow will lie even deeper, and there will be no work."

"Get her back quickly, Alfred, or the snow will lie too deep for you.
I will send you a note, Fanny."

"That is quite easy, is it?"

"Easy. But compromising."

"Oh, surely—not very?"

"In France everything is compromising, mademoiselle," said Alfred. "But he will find a way to send it."

Julien had urged her to hurry, fearing the snow; now he said, "You are going?" as though it distressed him.

"I must."

"Yes, you must, you must. Where is your leather coat? Here—"

He found it.

"Stay! I must read this before you go. It is my demobilisation paper with the final date. I will look—"

"Are you coming?" called Alfred, from the end of the passage. "It is snowing wildly."

"There is some mistake," muttered Julien, his eye searching the large unfolded document.

"When, when—?" Fanny, hanging on his words, watched him.

"One moment. It is a mistake. Alfred! Alfred, here, a minute!"

"Look," he said, when Alfred had re-entered the room. He handed the paper to him, and drew him under the light. "See, they say—ah, wait, did I register at Charleville or Paris?"

"At Charleville. As an agriculturist. I remember well."

"Then there is no mistake." He folded up the paper, pinching the edges of the folds slowly with his thumb and finger nail.

"Fanny, it has come sooner than I expected."

She could say nothing, but fastened her gaze upon his lips.

"Much, much sooner, and there is no evading it. Alfred, I will bring her in a minute."

"The snow is coming down," muttered the mahogany god, grown wooden again under the light, and retreated.

"It is worse for me; it has been done by my own stupidity. But in those days I didn't know you—"

"Oh, if you are thinking of breaking it to me—only tell me which day!
To-morrow?" She moved up close to him.

"Not to-morrow! No, no," he said, almost relieved that it was better than she feared. "In five days, in five days. Oh, this brings it before me! I have no wish now for that release for which I have longed. Fanny, it is only a change, not a parting!"

Alfred's voice called sharply from without. "You must come, mademoiselle!
Julien, bring her!"

"One instant. She is coming. Fanny, I must think it out. Until I go—I shall have time—we will get you sent to Charleville, and Charleville I must come often to see my land and my factory."

"How often?"

"Often, I must—"

"How often?"

"Once a week at last. Perhaps more often. If we can only manage that!"

"Julien!" Alfred returned and stood again in the doorway. "This is absurd. I can never get to the river if you keep her."

"Go, go. I will arrange! You will have a note from me to-morrow. Hurry, good-night, good-night!"

She was in the car; now the door was shutting on her; yet once more he pulled it open, "Ah! Oh, good-night!"

At the side of the car, the snow whirling round his head, Julien kissed her face in the darkness; Alfred, relentless, drove the car onward, and the door shutting with a slam, left him standing by the inn.