“Is it true that thou didst carry me in thine arms?” repeated Christine.

He murmured into her mouth: 

“Is it true?  Can she doubt?  The proof, then.”

And he picked her up as though she had been a doll, and carried her into the bedroom.  As she lay on the bed, she raised her arm and looked at the broken wrist-watch and sighed.

“My mascot.  It is not a blague, my mascot.”

Shortly afterwards she began to cry again, at first gently; then sobs supervened.

“She must sleep,” he said firmly.

She shook her head.

“I cannot.  I have been too upset.  It is impossible that I should sleep.”

“She must.”

“Go and buy me a drug.”

“If I go and buy her a drug, will she undress and get into bed while I am away?”

She nodded.

Calling Marthe, and taking the latch-key of the street-door, he went to his chemist’s in Dover Street and bought some potassium bromide and sal volatile.  When he came back Marthe whispered to him: 

“She sleeps.  She has told me everything as I undressed her.  The poor child!”

Chapter 32

MRS. BRAIDING

G.J. went home at once, partly so that Christine should not be disturbed, partly because he desired solitude in order to examine and compose his mind.  Mrs. Braiding had left an agreeable modest fire—­fit for cold April—­in the drawing-room.  He had just sat down in front of it and was tranquillising himself in the familiar harmonious beauty of the apartment (which, however, did seem rather insipid after the decorative excesses of Queen’s room), when he heard footsteps on the little stairway from the upper floor.  Mrs. Braiding entered the drawing-room.

This was a Mrs. Braiding very different from the Mrs. Braiding of 1914, a shameless creature of more rounded contours than of old, and not quite so spick and span as of old.  She was carrying in her arms that which before the war she could not have conceived herself as carrying.  The being was invisible in wraps, but it was there; and she seemed to have no shame for it, seemed indeed to be proud of it and defiant about it.

Braiding’s military career had been full of surprises.  He had expected within a few months of joining the colours to be dashing gloriously and homicidally at panic-stricken Germans across the plains of Flanders, to be, in fact, saving the Empire at the muzzle of rifle and the point of bayonet.  In truth, he found that for interminable, innumerable weeks his job was to save the Empire by cleaning harness on the East Coast of England—­for under advice he had transferred to the artillery.  Later, when his true qualifications were discovered, he had to save the Empire by polishing the buttons and serving the morning tea and buying the cigarettes of a major who in 1914 had been a lawyer by profession and a