“Not cold,” he said, taking her hand. “Only prudent. Or cowardly.”
They walked away, through the wood, hand in hand, as Dorothy and Von Arenburg had gone before them. Anna held his hand tight, and presently looked up at him with coaxing eyes and a childish pout.
“If you’re going so soon, we may as well begin to say good-bye.”
The meaning of her words was plain. She wanted him to kiss her, and under a tree there the place was good and discreet. He rather liked the idea of kissing her, but for a little warning that it could not end there, if he began. She called him “cold Englishman.” He was not that. He was too easily fired, and knew that if he once let a spark touch his passion, it might blaze into something like a bonfire. He didn’t want to make a blaze with this little German girl. So he compromised—the middle of the road again!—and raised her hand to his lips, very gallantly, but without ardour.
“Pooh!” she said, and taking her hand away, put it round his neck and pulled his head down and kissed him, and then with a laugh ran from him towards Dorothy and her husband, who appeared down one of the glades.
It was on the way home that evening that he told Dorothy of a telegram he had received that morning from Bernard Hall of The New World. His passport had been arranged with the Soviet authorities. Christy was waiting for him to go down the Volga in the famine region. Bernard Hall wanted the truth about the famine.
Dorothy received the news as a tragic blow.
“I can’t bear you to go away!” she cried. “Stay here, Bertram. Give up the visit to Russia. It’s more dangerous than ever. Stay with us in Germany, and make your home here.”
“My home?” he said, with a sudden pang of self-pity, “I have no home, now Joyce has left me.”
Dorothy answered him in a low, emotional voice.