ls pursue one another through a steep
darkness, the victims of unpremeditated suspicions and fears. As she
reached the lighted doorway she swung round and spread out her hands
with a gesture of pity and grief. 'Look!' she said. 'As we came out
someone fired. She was in front. It was not my fault.... You see.'

"While she spoke I endeavoured to collect my forces. I looked down. I
had a vivid impression of emerging from a place of imprisonment, a place
of great noise and activity and warm, pleasant excitement, and of seeing
before me a cold gray plain extending into the distance. And over this
plain, I reflected, I was to travel, alone. I looked down, I say. I
heard the girl beside me murmur hoarsely into my ear, and stoop to lift
the form that lay motionless at our feet.

"'No!' I said, drawing her back. 'This is for me to do. I will carry my
own dead.'"

CHAPTER IX

"And the rest," said Mr. Spenlove in a colourless voice, "is by way of
being an epilogue of detached and vagrant memories. They come to me now
and again, a sad sequence of blurred pictures in which I can see my own
figure in unfamiliar poses. There is the night which I passed in that
house, a night of endless recapitulations and regrets. There was the
moment when I turned from the bed, where the dead girl lay, and found
the other girl, with her extraordinary vitality, close beside me,
scrutinizing me as though I were a problem she found it impossible to
solve. And when I walked through into the other room and sat down beyond
a table on which a tiny oil lamp burned, she advanced into the circle of
light, so that her shadow was gigantic on the wall and ceiling behind
her, and looked across at me. There was a subtle change in her since we
had met in the street outside. She seemed full of an insatiable
curiosity to know my thoughts. And my thoughts just then were not for
any one to know. My thoughts resembled a flock of wild birds which had
been streaming steadily in one direction when a bomb had exploded among
them and sent them swirling and careening in crazy circles. And she did
this more than once. While I sat there in the semi-darkness beyond the
circle of light she came in with some bread and a bottle of wine, and
set a plate and glass beside them on the table, and then, after watching
me for a moment, went away again. There was a faint murmur from below
where a number of women from neighbouring houses were conversing in low
tones with the old