and carried her away.  But now he was so self-possessed.  Very friendly they were, and they met often—­in the ward for a few sentences that meant much to each of them; down town by arrangement in a cafe, or once or twice for dinner; and once for a day in the country, though not alone; and he was always the same.  Sometimes, on night duty, she would grope for an adjective to fit him, and could only think of “tender.”  He was that.  And she hated it, or all but hated it.  She did not want tenderness from him, for it seemed to her that tenderness meant that he was, as it were, standing aloof from her, considering, helping when he could.  She demanded the fierce rush of passion with which he would seize and shrine her in the centre of his heart, deaf to her entreaties, careless of her pain.  She would love then, she thought, and sometimes, going to the window of the ward and staring out over the harbour at the twinkling lights, she would bite her lip with the pain of it.  He had thought she dismissed love lightly when she called it animal passion.  Good God, if he only knew!...

Peter, for his part, did not realise so completely the change that had come over him.  For one thing, he saw himself all the time, and she did not.  She did not see him when he lay on his bed in a tense agony of desire for her.  She did not see him when life looked like a tumbled heap of ruins to him and she smiled beyond.  She all but only saw him when he was staring at the images that had been presented to him during the past months, or hearing in imagination Louise’s quaintly accepted English and her quick and vivid “La pauvre petite!”

For it was Louise, curiously enough, who affected him most in these days.  A friendship sprang up between them of which no one knew.  Pennell and Donovan, with whom he went everywhere, did not speak of it either to him or to one another, with that real chivalry that is in most men, but if they had they would have blundered, misunderstanding.  Arnold, of whom Peter saw a good deal, did not know, or, if he knew, Peter never knew that he knew.  Julie, who was well aware of his friendship with the two first men, knew that he saw French girls, and, indeed, openly chaffed him about it.  But under her chaff was an anxiety, typical of her.  She did not know how far he went in their company, and she would have given anything to know.  She guessed that, despite everything, he had had no physical relationship with any one of them, and she almost wished it might be otherwise.  She knew well that if he fell to them, he would the more readily turn to her.  There was a strength about him now that she dreaded.

Whatever Louise thought she kept wonderfully hidden.  He took her out to dinner in quiet places, and she would take him home to coffee, and they would chat, and there was an end.  She was seemingly well content.  She did her business, and they would even speak of it.  “I cannot come to-night, mon ami,” she would say; “I am busy.”  She would nod to him as she passed out of the restaurant with someone else, and he would smile back at her.  Nor did he ever remonstrate or urge her to change her ways.  And she knew why.  He had no key with which to open her cage.