“I know why she refuses to stay.”

She cried, plaintive: 

“It is not that I have another rendezvous.  No!  But naturally thou thinkest it is that.”

He shook his head.

“Not at all.  The little silly wants to go back home because she finds there is no servant here.  She is insulted in her pride.  I noticed it in her first words when she came in.  And yet she ought to know—­”

Christine gave a loud laugh that really disconcerted him.

“Au revoir, my old one.  Embrace me.”  She dropped the veil.

“No!”

He could play a game of pretence longer than she could.  She moved with dignity towards the door, but never would she depart like that.  He knew that when it came to the point she was at the mercy of her passion for him.  She had confessed the tyranny of her passion, as such victims foolishly will.  Moreover he had perceived it for himself.  He followed her to the door.  At the door she would relent.  And, sure enough, at the door she leapt at him and clasped his neck with fierceness and fiercely kissed him through her veil, and exclaimed bitterly: 

“Ah!  Thou dost not love me, but I love thee!”

But the next instant she had managed to open the door and she was gone.

He sprang out to the landing.  She was running down the stone stairs.

“Christine!”

She did not stop.  G.J. might be marvellously subtle; but he could not be subtle enough to divine that on that night Christine happened to be the devotee of the most clement Virgin, and that her demeanour throughout the visit had been contrived, half unconsciously, to enable her to perform a deed of superb self-denial and renunciation in the service of the dread goddess.  He ate most miserably alone, facing an empty chair; the desolate solitude of the evening was terrible; he lacked the force to go seeking succour in clubs.

Chapter 20

MASCOT

A single light burned in Christine’s bedroom.  It stood low on the pedestal by the wide bed and was heavily shaded, so that only one half of the bed, Christine’s half, was exempt from the general gloom of the chamber.  The officer had thus ordained things.  The white, plump arm of Christine was imprisoned under his neck.  He had ordered that too.  He was asleep.  Christine watched him.  On her return from the Albany she had found him apparently just as she had left him, except that he was much less talkative.  Indeed, though unswervingly polite—­even punctilious with her—­he had grown quite taciturn and very obstinate and finicking in self-assertion.  There was no detail as to which he did not formulate a definite wish.  Yet not until by chance her eye fell on the whisky decanter did she perceive that in her absence he had been copiously drinking again.  He was not, however, drunk.  Remorseful at her defection, she constituted herself his slave; she covered him with acquiescences; she drank his tippler’s breath.  And he was not particularly responsive.  He had all his own ideas.  He ought, for example, to have been hungry, but his idea was that he was not hungry; therefore he had refused her dishes.