e woman's
figure, solitary, fragile and pale in the darkness. They seemed for an
instant to lust for her; and then, recognising that she was not their
prey, to sink back into the torpor of their inexhaustible patience.
The sight of them was prejudicial to the dominion of the unseen
powers. Christine admitted to herself that she had drunk a lot, that
she was demented, that her only proper course was to return dutifully
to the supper-party. She wondered what, if she did not so return, she
could possibly say to justify herself to G.J.

Nevertheless she went on down the street, hurrying, automatic, and
reached the main thoroughfare. It was dark with the new protective
darkness. The central hooded lamps showed like poor candles, making a
series of rings of feeble illumination on the vast invisible floor of
the road. Nobody was afoot; not a soul. The last of the motor-buses
that went about killing and maiming people in the new protective
darkness had long since reached its yard. The seductive dim violet
bulbs were all extinguished on the entrances of the theatres, and,
save for a thread of light at some lofty window here and there, the
curving facades of the street were as undecipherable as the heavens
above or as the asphalte beneath.

Then Christine's ear detected a faint roar. It grew louder; it became
terrific; and a long succession of huge loaded army waggons with
peering head-lamps thundered past at full speed, one close behind
the next, shaking the very avenue. The slightest misjudgment by the
leading waggon in the confusion of light and darkness--and the whole
convoy would have pitched itself together in a mass of iron, flesh,
blood and ordnance; but the convoy went ruthlessly and safely forward
till its final red tail-lamp swung round a corner and vanished. The
avenue ceased to shake. The thunder died away, and there was silence
again. Whence and why the convoy came, and at whose dread omnipotent
command? Whither it was bound? What it carried? No answer in the
darkness to these enigmas!... And Christine was afraid of England. She
remembered people in Ostend saying that England would never go to war.
She, too, had said it, bitterly. And now she was in the midst of the
unmeasured city which had darkened itself for war, and she was afraid
of an unloosed might....

What madness was she doing? She did not even know the man's name.
She knew only that he was "Edgar W." She would have liked to be his
_marraine_, accordin