spent less than a year in the convent.

After a few moments they both rose, and Christine, bending over G.J.,
whispered lovingly in his ear:

"Dear, thou wilt not be jealous if I dance one turn with thy young
friend?"

She was addressing the wrong person. Already throughout the supper
Aida, ignoring the fact that the whole structure of civilised society
is based on the rule that at a meal a man must talk first to the lady
on his right and then to the lady on his left and so on infinitely,
had secretly taken exception to the periodic intercourse--and
particularly the intercourse in French--between Christine and Molder,
who was officially "hers". That these two should go off and dance
together was the supreme insult to her. By ill-chance she had not
sufficient physical command of herself.

Christine felt that Molder would have danced better two hours earlier;
but still he danced beautifully. Their bodies fitted like two parts
of a jigsaw puzzle that have discovered each other. She realised that
G.J. was middle-aged, and regret tinctured the ecstasy of the dance.
Then suddenly she heard a loud, imploring cry in her ear:

"Christine!"

She looked round, pale, still dancing, but only by inertia.

Nobody was near her. The four people at the Major's table gave no sign
of agitation or even of interest. The Major still had Alice more or
less in his arms.

"What was that?" she asked wildly.

"What was what?" said Molder, at a loss to understand her
extraordinary demeanour.

And she heard the cry again, and then again:

"Christine! Christine!"

She recognised the voice. It was the voice of the officer whom she had
taken to Victoria Station one Sunday night months and months ago.

"Excuse me!" she said, slipping from Molder's hold, and she hurried
out of the room to the ladies' cloak-room, got her wraps, and ran past
the watchful guardian, through the dark, dubious portico of the club
into the street. The thing was done in a moment, and why she did it
she could not tell. She knew simply that she must do it, and that she
was under the dominion of those unseen powers in whom she had always
believed. She forgot the Guinea-Fowl as completely as though it had
been a pre-natal phenomenon with her.

Chapter 24

THE SOLDIER

But outside she lost faith. Half a dozen motor-cars were slumbering
in a row near the door of the Guinea-Fowl, and they all stirred
monstrously yet scarcely perceptibly at the sight of th