Then Christine’s ear detected a faint roar.  It grew louder; it became terrific; and a long succession of huge loaded army waggons with peering head-lamps thundered past at full speed, one close behind the next, shaking the very avenue.  The slightest misjudgment by the leading waggon in the confusion of light and darkness—­and the whole convoy would have pitched itself together in a mass of iron, flesh, blood and ordnance; but the convoy went ruthlessly and safely forward till its final red tail-lamp swung round a corner and vanished.  The avenue ceased to shake.  The thunder died away, and there was silence again.  Whence and why the convoy came, and at whose dread omnipotent command?  Whither it was bound?  What it carried?  No answer in the darkness to these enigmas!...  And Christine was afraid of England.  She remembered people in Ostend saying that England would never go to war.  She, too, had said it, bitterly.  And now she was in the midst of the unmeasured city which had darkened itself for war, and she was afraid of an unloosed might....

What madness was she doing?  She did not even know the man’s name.  She knew only that he was “Edgar W.”  She would have liked to be his marraine, according to the French custom, but he had never written to her.  He was still in her debt for the hotel bill and the taxi fare.  He had not even kissed her at the station.  She tried to fancy that she heard his voice calling “Christine” with frantic supplication in her ears, but she could not.  She turned into another side street, and saw a lighted doorway.  Two soldiers were standing in the veiled radiance.  She could just read the lower half of the painted notice:  “All service men welcome.  Beds.  Meals.  Writing and reading rooms.  Always open.”  She passed on.  One of the soldiers, a non-commissioned officer of mature years, solemnly winked at her, without moving an unnecessary muscle.  She looked modestly down.

Twenty yards further on she described near a lamp-post a tall soldier whose somewhat bent body seemed to be clustered over with pots, pans, tins, bags, valises, satchels and weapons, like the figure of some military Father Christmas on his surreptitious rounds.  She knew that he must be a poor benighted fellow just back from the trenches.  He was staring up at the place where the street-sign ought to have been.  He glanced at her, and said, in a fatigued, gloomy, aristocratic voice: 

“Pardon me, Madam.  Is this Denman Street?  I want to find the Denman Hostel.”

Christine looked into his face.  A sacred dew suffused her from head to foot.  She trembled with an intimidated joy.  She felt the mystic influences of all the unseen powers.  She knew herself with holy dread to be the chosen of the very clement Virgin, and the channel of a miraculous intervention.  It was the most marvellous, sweetest thing that had ever happened.  It was humanly incredible, but it had happened.

“Is it you?” she murmured in a soft, breaking voice.