sed to nose and mouth.

"Horrible, horrible!" she said, at the same time raising her shoulders
in their heavy cape. "Oh, that man!--I shall never forget his face."

"What do you go to such places for? You have only yourself to thank for
it." He, too, was aware that a needless and repellent memory had been
added to their lives.

"Oh, everything's my own fault--I know that. You are never to blame for
anything!"

"Did I ask you to go there?--did I?"

But she only laughed in reply, through and through hostile to him; and
they walked for some distance in silence.

"Why are you going this way?" he asked suspiciously, when she turned
into a street that led in the opposite direction to that which they
should have taken.

"I'm not going home. I couldn't sit alone in the dark with that ...
that thing before my eyes."

"Who asked you to sit alone?--Where are you going?"

"I don't know ... where I like."

"That's no answer."

"And if I don't choose to answer?--I don't want you. I want to be
alone. I'm sick of your perpetual bad-temper, and your eternal
self-righteousness."

He laughed, just as she had done. The sound enraged her.

"Oh, the dead at least are at peace!" she cried.

"Yes! ... why don't you say it? You wish you were lying there--at peace
from me!"

"Why should I say what you know so well?"

"Go and do it then!--who's hindering you?"

"For you?--kill myself for you?"

One word gave another; they pressed forward, in the falling dusk, like
two distraught creatures, heedless of the notice they attracted, or of
who should hear their bitter words. And because their gestures were, to
some extent, regulated by the conventions of the street, because they
could not face each other with flaming eyes, and throw out hands and
arms to emphasise what they said, their words were all the more cruel.
Louise made straight for home now; she escaped into the house, banging
the door. Maurice strode down the street, in a tumult of resentment,
vowing never to return.

Avery Hill was buried the following afternoon. Maurice went to the
funeral, because, since he had seen the dead girl's body at the
mortuary, he had been invaded by a kind of pity for her, lying alone at
the mercy of barber and LEICHENFRAU. And so, towards three o'clock, he
fought his way against a cutting wind to the JOHANNISFRIEDHOF.

A mere handful of people stood round the grave. In addition to the
English chaplain, and a couple of diggers, there we