Peace—passionately he prayed for it. And to-morrow that peace would be his.
Soothed by the mere thought of his imminent release, he turned back again towards the room which he had grown to hate. It was a prim, mid-Victorian-looking apartment, stuffy from a porcelain stove and crowded with horsehair furniture. At the round table of highly polished walnut-wood, his landlady sat at her knitting.
Apparently about forty years of age, madame was of ponderous build, clumsy as a Flemish horse, with massive heaving shoulders, and broad hips. Abundant black hair was brushed back from her face and gathered in a knot on the top of her head. Her sallow skin was partially redeemed by the beauty of her eyes—velvet-brown and fringed with thick lashes. Her full lips were pencilled with a fine line of black down. It was a typical enough face of a daughter of the people, sprung from peasant stock and now the wife of a small tradesman.
This was the woman whom Quality feared with his very soul.
When he had first rented her apartment, she had reminded him of a woman in a fairy-tale, who, while apparently honest and homely, concealed under her ordinary exterior that element of the sinister supernatural that often accompanies such histories. Thus looked the pleasant-faced female, who afterwards figured as the ogress; thus appeared the harmless peasant, who changed nightly into a were-wolf.
It was not his fanciful idea of a composite personality, however, which inspired Quality’s dislike of his landlady. That had come with the knowledge that she was utterly lacking in the usual sentiments of humanity. Undisturbed by any horrors of the siege, and showing neither pity nor fear, she continued her daily routine with the mechanical precision of a machine. The sole interest that she ever showed in her boarder was connected with the weekly note.
It was since the War that his distaste had magnified into fear. And his fear was the craven terror of one who, amidst hostile surroundings, carries his very life on a tongue-string. For Fate, choosing her instrument with callous cruelty, had ordained that he should serve his country by means of those subterranean methods, for which the punishment is summary death.
Quality now eyed the woman with the oblique glance of suspicion.
How much did madame know? Did she merely suspect? Was her inaction a sign of ignorance? Or was she on crouch, biding her time to pounce?