She had a duty to him, and her duty was to brighten his
destiny, to give him joy, not to let him go without a charming memory
of her soft womanly acquiescences. At the same time her temperament
was aroused by his personality; and she did not forget she had a
living to earn; but still her chief concern was his satisfaction,
not her own, and her overmastering sentiment one of dutiful, nay
religious, surrender. French gratitude of the English fighter, and a
mystic, fearful allegiance to the very clement Virgin--these things
inspired her.

"Ah!" he sighed. "My throat's like leather." And seeing that she did
not follow, he added: "Thirsty." He stretched his arms. She went
to the sideboard and half filled a tumbler with soda water from the
siphon.

"Drink!" she said, as if to a child.

"Just a dash! The tiniest dash!" he pleaded in his rich voice, with a
glance at the whisky. "You don't know how it'll pull me together. You
don't know how I need it."

But she did know, and she humoured him, shaking her head
disapprovingly.

He drank and smacked his lips.

"Ah!" he breathed voluptuously, and then said in changed, playful
accents: "Your French accent is exquisite. It makes English sound
quite beautiful. And you're the daintiest little thing."

"Daintiest? What is that? I have much to learn in English. But it is
something nice--daintiest; it is a compliment." She somehow understood
then that, despite appearances, he was not really a devotee of her
sex, that he was really a solitary, that he would never die of love,
and that her _role_ was a minor _role_ in his existence. And she
accepted the fact with humility, with enthusiasm, with ardour, quite
ready to please and to be forgotten. In playing the slave to him she
had the fierce French illusion of killing Germans.

Suddenly she noticed that he was wearing two wrist-watches, one close
to the other, on his left arm, and she remarked on the strange fact.

The officer's face changed.

"Have you got a wrist-watch?" he demanded.

"No."

Silently he unfastened one of the watches and then said:

"Hold out your beautiful arm."

She did so. He fastened the watch on her arm. She was surprised to see
that it was a lady's watch. The black strap was deeply scratched. She
privately reconstructed the history of the watch, and decided that it
must be a gift returned after a quarrel--and perhaps the scratches on
the strap had something to do with the quarrel.

"I beg you to a