and the Gare Maritime. A gangway was out and a hurried survey showed
no one in sight.

Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and opened the door. The fresh morning
air revived her, but nevertheless it was an extremely pale young woman
who, obeying Henri's instructions, went ashore that morning in the gray
dawn unseen, undisturbed and unquestioned. But from the moment she
appeared on the gangway until the double glass doors of the Gare
Maritime closed behind her this apparently calm young woman did not
breathe at all. She arrived, indeed, with lungs fairly collapsed and
her heart entirely unreliable.

A woman clerk was asleep at a desk. Sara Lee roused her to half
wakefulness, no interest and extremely poor English. A drowsy porter
led her up a staircase and down an endless corridor. Then at last he
was gone, and Sara Lee turned the key in her door and burst into tears.

VII

Now up to this point Sara Lee's mind had come to rest at Calais. She
must get there; after that the other things would need to be worried
over. Henri had already in their short acquaintance installed himself
as the central figure of this strange and amazing interlude--not as a
good-looking young soldier surprisingly fertile in expedients, but as a
sort of agent of providence, by whom and through whom things were done.

And Henri had said she was to go to the Gare Maritime at Calais and make
herself comfortable--if she got there. After that things would be
arranged.

Sara Lee therefore took a hot bath, though hardly a satisfactory one,
for there was no soap and she had brought none. She learned later on
to carry soap with her everywhere. So she soaked the chill out of her
slim body and then dressed. The room was cold, but a great exultation
kept her warm. She had run the blockade, she had escaped the War
Office--which, by the way, was looking her up almost violently by
that time, via the censor. It had found the trunk she left at Morley's,
and cross-questioned the maid into hysteria--and here she was,
safe in France, the harbor of Calais before her, and here and there
strange-looking war craft taking on coal. Destroyers, she learned later.
Her ignorance was rather appalling at first.

It was all unreal--the room with its cold steam pipes, the heavy window
hangings, the very words on the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. A
great vessel moved into the harbor. As it turned she saw its name
printed on its side in huge letters, and the flag,