"No doubt there's some mistake," he answered, politely, in excellent English. "But I must request you to stay in the compartment."
He seated himself and asked her permission to smoke. The passengers had all alighted and the train seemed very still. Presently another officer came and demanded her papers, which he took away with him. Half an hour went by and Sylvia began to feel hungry. She asked the officer in the compartment if it would be possible to get some coffee.
"Of course," he answered, with a smile, calling to some one in the corridor. A soldier with fixed bayonet came along and took his commands; presently two cups of black coffee and a packet of cigarettes arrived.
The officer was young and had a pleasant face, but he declined to be drawn into conversation beyond offering Sylvia her coffee and the cigarettes. An hour passed in this way.
"How long am I likely to be kept here?" she asked, irritably.
The young officer looked uncomfortable and invited her to have another cup of coffee, but he did not answer her question. At last, when Sylvia was beginning to feel thoroughly miserable, there was a sound of voices in the corridor, and an English captain in much-stained khaki appeared in the entrance to the compartment.
"Good morning," he said. "Sorry you've been kept waiting like this. My fault, I'm afraid. Fact is, I won a bath at piquet last night, and not even the detention of a compatriot would make me forgo one exquisite moment of it."
He was a tall, thin man in the early thirties, with a languid manner of speech and movement that, though it seemed at first out of keeping with the substance of his conversation, nevertheless oddly enhanced it somehow. Sylvia had an impression that his point of view about everything was worn and stained like his uniform, but that, like his uniform, it preserved a fundamentally good quality of cloth and cut. His arrival smoothed away much of her annoyance because she discerned in him a capacity for approaching a case upon its own merits and a complete indifference to any professionalism real or assumed for the duration of the war. In a word, she found his personality sympathetic, and long experience had given her the assurance that wherever this was so she could count upon rousing a reciprocal confidence.
"Good morning, Antitch," he was saying to the young Serbian officer who had been keeping guard over her. And to Sylvia he added: "Antitch was at Oxford and speaks English like an Englishman."
"I've had very little chance of knowing if he could even speak his own language," she said, sharply.