he
asked him whether it might not, after all, turn out better than he
expected.

No, he did not think that it could. But he didn't mind how it turned
out--at least he couldn't look that far. The point was that he was in
it, up to the neck, and he was never going to be out of it again.

There was something boyish about that that pleased her. She put her
plump hand on his knee and told him how she had first met the Baron,
down in the South, at Kieff, how grand he had looked; how, seeing her
across a room full of people, he had smiled at her before he had ever
spoken to her or knew her name. "I was quite pretty then," she added. "I
have never regretted our marriage for a single moment," she said. "Nor,
I know, has he."

"We hoped there would he children...." She gave a pathetic little
gesture. "We will get away down to the South again as soon as the
troubles are over," she ended.

I don't suppose he was thinking much of her--his mind was on Vera all
the time--but after he had left her and lay in bed, sleepless, his mind
dwelt on her affectionately, and he thought that he would like to help
her. He realised, quite clearly, that Wilderling was in a very dangerous
position, but I don't think that it ever occurred to him for a moment
that it would be wise for him to move to another flat.

On the next day, Thursday, Lawrence did not return until the middle of
the afternoon. The town was, by now, comparatively quiet again. Numbers
of the police had been caught and imprisoned, some had been shot and
others were in hiding; most of the machine-guns shooting from the roofs
had ceased. The abdication of the Czar had already produced the second
phase of the Revolution--the beginning of the struggle between the
Provisional Government and the Council of Workmen and Soldiers'
Deputies, and this was proceeding, for the moment, inside the walls of
the Duma rather than in the streets and squares of the town. Lawrence
returned, therefore, that afternoon with a strange sense of quiet and
security.

"It was almost, you know, as though this tommy-rot about a White
Revolution might be true after all--with this jolly old Duma and their
jolly old Kerensky runnin' the show. Of course I'd seen the nonsense
about their not salutin' the officers and all that, but I didn't think
any fellers alive would be such dam fools.... I might have known
better."

He let himself into the flat and found there a death-like stillness--no
one about and no so