always
the same. Sometimes, on night duty, she would grope for an adjective to
fit him, and could only think of "tender." He was that. And she hated it,
or all but hated it. She did not want tenderness from him, for it seemed
to her that tenderness meant that he was, as it were, standing aloof from
her, considering, helping when he could. She demanded the fierce rush of
passion with which he would seize and shrine her in the centre of his
heart, deaf to her entreaties, careless of her pain. She would love then,
she thought, and sometimes, going to the window of the ward and staring
out over the harbour at the twinkling lights, she would bite her lip with
the pain of it. He had thought she dismissed love lightly when she called
it animal passion. Good God, if he only knew!...

Peter, for his part, did not realise so completely the change that had
come over him. For one thing, he saw himself all the time, and she did
not. She did not see him when he lay on his bed in a tense agony of
desire for her. She did not see him when life looked like a tumbled heap
of ruins to him and she smiled beyond. She all but only saw him when he
was staring at the images that had been presented to him during the past
months, or hearing in imagination Louise's quaintly accepted English and
her quick and vivid "La pauvre petite!"

For it was Louise, curiously enough, who affected him most in these days.
A friendship sprang up between them of which no one knew. Pennell and
Donovan, with whom he went everywhere, did not speak of it either to him
or to one another, with that real chivalry that is in most men, but if
they had they would have blundered, misunderstanding. Arnold, of whom
Peter saw a good deal, did not know, or, if he knew, Peter never knew
that he knew. Julie, who was well aware of his friendship with the two
first men, knew that he saw French girls, and, indeed, openly chaffed
him about it. But under her chaff was an anxiety, typical of her. She did
not know how far he went in their company, and she would have given
anything to know. She guessed that, despite everything, he had had no
physical relationship with any one of them, and she almost wished it
might be otherwise. She knew well that if he fell to them, he would the
more readily turn to her. There was a strength about him now that she
dreaded.

Whatever Louise thought she kept wonderfully hidden. He took her out to
dinner in quiet places, and she would take him home to co