THE RING

The flat was in darkness, except for the little lamp by the bedside.  The soldier lay asleep in his flannel shirt in the wide bed, and Christine lay awake next him.  His clothes were heaped on a chair.  His eighty pounds’ weight of kit were deposited in a corner of the drawing-room.  On the table in the drawing-room were the remains of a meal.  Christine was thinking, carelessly and without apprehension, of what she should say to G.J.  She would tell him that she had suddenly felt unwell.  No!  That would be silly.  She would tell him that he really had not the right to ask her to meet such women as Aida and Alice.  Had he no respect for her?  Or she would tell him that Aida had obviously meant to attack her, and that the dance with Lieutenant Molder was simply a device to enable her to get away quietly and avoid all scandal in a resort where scandal was intensely deprecated.  She could tell him fifty things, and he would have to accept whatever she chose to tell him.  She was mystically happy in the incomparable marvel of the miracle, and in her care of the dull, unresponding man.  Her heart yearned thankfully, devotedly, passionately to the Virgin of the VII Dolours.

In the profound nocturnal silence broken only by the man’s slow, regular breathing, she heard a sudden ring.  It was the front-door bell ringing in the kitchen.  The bell rang again and again obstinately.  G.J.’s party was over, then, and he had arrived to make inquiries.  She smiled, and did not move.  After a few moments she could hear Marthe stirring.  She sprang up, and then, cunningly considerate, slipped from under the bed-clothes as noiselessly and as smoothly as a snake, so that the man should not be disturbed.  The two women met in the little hall, Christine in the immodesty of a lacy and diaphanous garment, and Marthe in a coarse cotton nightgown covered with a shawl.  The bell rang once more, loudly, close to their ears.

“Are you mad?” Christine whispered with fierceness.  “Go back to bed.  Let him ring.”

Chapter 26

THE RETURN

It was afternoon in April, 1916.  G.J. rang the right bell at the entrance of the London home of the Lechfords.  Lechford House, designed about 1840 by an Englishman of genius who in this rare instance had found a patron with the wit to let him alone, was one of the finest examples of domestic architecture in the West End.  Inspired by the formidable palaces of Rome and Florence, the artist had conceived a building in the style of the Italian renaissance, but modified, softened, chastened, civilised, to express the bland and yet haughty sobriety of the English climate and the English peerage.  People without an eye for the perfect would have correctly described it as a large plain house in grey stone, of three storeys, with a width of four windows on either side of its black front door, a jutting cornice, and rather elaborate