it generously, and to do it all the time.  And she, she had won him.  He had recognised her qualities.  She had denied any claim upon him, but by his decision he had admitted a claim—­a claim that no money could satisfy.  After all, for eighteen months she had been more to him than any other woman.  He had talked freely to her.  He had concealed naught from her.  He had spoken to her of his discouragements and his weaknesses.  He had had no shame before her.  By her acquiescences, her skill, her warmth, her adaptability, her intense womanliness, she had created between them a bond stronger than anything that could keep them apart.  The bond existed.  It could not during the whole future be broken save by a disloyalty.  A disloyalty, she divined, would irrevocably destroy it.  But she had no fear on that score, for she knew her own nature.  His decision did more than fill her with a dizzy sense of relief, a mad, intolerable happiness—­it re-established her self-respect.  No ordinary woman, handicapped as she was, could have captured this fastidious and shy paragon ...  And the notion that her passion for him had dwindled was utterly ridiculous, like the notion that he would tire of her.  She was saved.  She burst into wild tears.

“Ah!  Pardon me!” she sobbed.  “I am quite calm, really.  But since the air-raid, thou knowest, I have not been quite the same ...  Thou!  Thou art different.  Nothing could disturb thy calm.  Ah!  If thou wert a general at the front!  What sang-froid!  What presence of mind!  But I—­”

He bent towards her, and she suddenly sprang up and seized him round the neck, and ate his lips, and while she strangled and consumed him she kept muttering to him: 

“Hope not that I shall thank thee.  I cannot.  I cannot!  The words with which I could thank thee do not exist.  But I am thine, thine!  All of me is thine.  Humiliate me!  Demand of me impossible things!  I am thy slave, thy creature!  Ah!  Let me kiss thy beautiful grey hairs.  I love thy hair.  And thy ears ...”

The thought of her insatiable temperament flashed through her as she held him, and of his northern sobriety, and of the profound, unchangeable difference between these two.  She would discipline her temperament; she would subjugate it.  Women were capable of miracles—­and women alone.  And she was capable of miracles.

A strange, muffled noise came to them across the darkness of the sitting-room, and G.J. raised his head slightly to listen.

“Repose!  Repose thyself in the arms of thy little mother,” she breathed softly.  “It is nothing.  It is but the wind blowing the blind against the curtains.”

And later, when she had distilled the magic of the hour and was tranquillised, she said: 

“And where is it, this flat?”

Chapter 39

IDYLL

Christine said to Marie, otherwise La Mere Gaston, the new servant in the new flat, who was holding in her hand a telegram addressed to “Hoape, Albany”: