ht, his face just a dim blur. He passed,
smoking a cigarette. She crammed her hand against her mouth to stop
herself from speaking and the crushed gardenia filled her nostrils with
its cold, fragrant velvet. He was gone, the door below was shut. A wild,
half-stupid longing came on her to go up again, wait till he came in,
throw herself upon him, tell him she was going, beg him to keep her with
him. Ah! and he would! He would look at her with that haggard pity she
could not bear, and say, "Of course, Leila, of course." No! By God, no!
"I am going quietly home," she muttered; "just quietly home! Come along,
be brave; don't be a fool! Come along!" And she went down into the
street: At the entrance to the Park she saw him, fifty yards in front,
dawdling along. And, as if she had been his shadow lengthened out
to that far distance, she moved behind him. Slowly, always at that
distance, she followed him under the plane-trees, along the Park
railings, past St. James's Palace, into Pall Mall. He went up some
steps, and vanished into his Club. It was the end. She looked up at the
building; a monstrous granite tomb, all dark. An emptied cab was just
moving from the door. She got in. "Camelot Mansions, St. John's Wood."
And braced against the cushions, panting, and clenching her hands, she
thought: 'Well, I've seen him again. Hard crust's better than no bread.
Oh, God! All finished--not a crumb, not a crumb! Vive-la, vive-la,
vive-la ve. Vive-la compagnie!'

XIV

Fort had been lying there about an hour, sleeping and awake, before that
visit: He had dreamed a curious and wonderfully emotionalising dream. A
long grey line, in a dim light, neither of night nor morning, the whole
length of the battle-front in France, charging in short drives, which
carried the line a little forward, with just a tiny pause and suck-back;
then on again irresistibly, on and on; and at each rush, every voice,
his own among them, shouted "Hooray! the English! Hooray! the English!"
The sensation of that advancing tide of dim figures in grey light, the
throb and roar, the wonderful, rhythmic steady drive of it, no more
to be stopped than the waves of an incoming tide, was gloriously
fascinating; life was nothing, death nothing. "Hooray, the English!" In
that dream, he was his country, he was every one of that long charging
line, driving forward in. those great heaving pulsations, irresistible,
on and on. Out of the very centre of this intoxicating dre