“Have you ever been in love?” she asked.

“Yes.  Once,” he said.

“Was he in love now?”

“Yes.”

“With some one in Russia?”

“Yes.”

She hoped that he would be happy.  He told her that he didn’t think happiness was quite the point in this particular case.  There were other things more important—­and, anyway, it was inevitable.

“He had fallen in love at first sight?”

“Yes.  The very first moment.”

She sighed.  So had she.  It was, she thought, the only real way.  She asked him whether it might not, after all, turn out better than he expected.

No, he did not think that it could.  But he didn’t mind how it turned out—­at least he couldn’t look that far.  The point was that he was in it, up to the neck, and he was never going to be out of it again.

There was something boyish about that that pleased her.  She put her plump hand on his knee and told him how she had first met the Baron, down in the South, at Kieff, how grand he had looked; how, seeing her across a room full of people, he had smiled at her before he had ever spoken to her or knew her name.  “I was quite pretty then,” she added.  “I have never regretted our marriage for a single moment,” she said.  “Nor, I know, has he.”

“We hoped there would he children....”  She gave a pathetic little gesture.  “We will get away down to the South again as soon as the troubles are over,” she ended.

I don’t suppose he was thinking much of her—­his mind was on Vera all the time—­but after he had left her and lay in bed, sleepless, his mind dwelt on her affectionately, and he thought that he would like to help her.  He realised, quite clearly, that Wilderling was in a very dangerous position, but I don’t think that it ever occurred to him for a moment that it would be wise for him to move to another flat.

On the next day, Thursday, Lawrence did not return until the middle of the afternoon.  The town was, by now, comparatively quiet again.  Numbers of the police had been caught and imprisoned, some had been shot and others were in hiding; most of the machine-guns shooting from the roofs had ceased.  The abdication of the Czar had already produced the second phase of the Revolution—­the beginning of the struggle between the Provisional Government and the Council of Workmen and Soldiers’ Deputies, and this was proceeding, for the moment, inside the walls of the Duma rather than in the streets and squares of the town.  Lawrence returned, therefore, that afternoon with a strange sense of quiet and security.

“It was almost, you know, as though this tommy-rot about a White Revolution might be true after all—­with this jolly old Duma and their jolly old Kerensky runnin’ the show.  Of course I’d seen the nonsense about their not salutin’ the officers and all that, but I didn’t think any fellers alive would be such dam fools....  I might have known better.”