He took her cheeks in his hands. “More and more do you surpass the Princess of my dreams.”
She laughed. “I’m an Englishwoman.”
“And so, you don’t want to know where I’m going?”
She moved aside. “Of course I do. I shall be in a fever till you come back. But if I’m not to know—well—I’m not to know. It’s enough for me that you’re serving your country. Tell me,” she said suddenly, catching him by the coat lapels. “There’s no danger.”
He smiled. “Not a little tiny bit. Of that you can be assured. The worst is a voyage to Helsingfors and back. So I gathered from the telegram, which was in execrable Foreign Office Russian.”
“And when are you going?”
“By the first train. I must report to-night.”
“Can’t I come with you—as far as London?”
He considered for a moment. “No,” he said. “Where would you sleep? In all probability I shall have to take the midnight boat to Havre.”
An hour later they parted. She returned to the empty house frightened at she knew not what, insecure, terrifyingly alone; she was fretted by an uncanny sense of having mated with the inhabitant of another planet who had suddenly taken wing through the vast emptiness to the strange sphere of his birth. She wandered up and down the veranda, in and out of the three intimate rooms, where the traces of his late presence, books, papers, clothes, lay strewn carelessly about. She smiled wanly, reflecting that he wore his surroundings loosely as he did his clothes. Suddenly she uttered a little feminine cry, as her glance fell on his wrist watch lying on the drawing-room mantelpiece. He had forgotten it. She took it up with the impulsive intention of posting it to him at once. But the impulse fell into the nervelessness of death, when she remembered that he had given her no address. She must await his telegram—to-morrow, the next day, the day after, he could not say. Meanwhile, he would be chafing at the lack of his watch. She worried herself infinitely over the trifle, unconsciously finding relief in the definite.