He looked at her and smiled with a hard pity.  Compunction always worked in him at the sight of her haggard face, glazed and stained with crying.

“That’s how—­by getting older.

“I’ve never tired of you.  You’re more to me now than you were when I first knew you.  It’s when I see you looking old that I’m sure I love you.”

She smiled, too, in her sad sexual wisdom.

“There may be women who’d believe you, Larry, or who’d say they believe you; but not me.”

“It’s the truth,” he said.  “If you were young and if you were married to me I should have enlisted months ago.

“Can’t you see it’s not you, it’s this life we lead that I’m sick and tired of?  I tell you I’d rather be hanged than go on with it.  I’d rather be a prisoner in Germany than shut up in this house of yours.”

“Poor little house.  You used to like it.  What’s wrong with it now?”

“Everything.  Those damned lime-trees all round it.  And that damned white wall round the lime-trees.  Shutting me in.

“And those curtains in your bed-room.  Shutting me in.

“And your mind, trying to shut mine in.

“I come into this room and I find Phyllis Desmond in it and Orde-Jones, drinking tea and talking.  I go upstairs for peace, and Michael and Ellis are sitting there—­talking; trying to persuade themselves that funk’s the divinest thing in God’s universe.

“And over there’s the one thing I’ve been looking for all my life—­the one thing I’ve cared for.  And you’re keeping me from it.”

They left it.  But it began all over again the next day and the next.  And Lawrence went on growing his moustache and trying to train it upwards in the way she hated.

* * * * *

One evening, towards dinner-time he turned up in khaki, the moustache stiff on his long upper lip, his lopping hair clipped.  He was another man, a strange man, and she was not sure whether she hated him or not.

But she dried her eyes and dressed her hair, and put on her best gown to do honour to his khaki.

She said, “It’ll be like living with another man.”

“You won’t have very long to live with him,” said Lawrence.

And even then, sombrely, under the shadow of his destiny, her passion for him revived; his very strangeness quickened it to violence, to perversity.

And in the morning the Army took him from her; it held him out of her reach.  He refused to let her go with him to the place where he was stationed.

“What would you do,” she said, “if I followed you?  Shoot me?”

“I might shoot myself.  Anyhow, you’d never see me or hear from me again.”

* * * * *

He went out to France three weeks before Nicholas.

She had worn herself out with wondering when he would be sent, till she, too, was in a hurry for him to go and end it.  Now that he had gone she felt nothing but a clean and sane relief that was a sort of peace.  She told herself that she would rather he were killed soon than that she should be tortured any longer with suspense.