John's face.

How could you care for a thing like that? How could you want a thing like
that to care for you?

And she? She didn't matter. Nothing mattered in all the world but Them.




XIV


It was Saturday, the tenth of October, the day after the fall of Antwerp.
The Germans were pressing closer round Ghent; they might march in any
day. She had been in Belgium a hundred years; she had lived a hundred
years under this doom.

But at last she was free of John. Utterly free. His mind would have no
power over her any more. Nor yet his body. She was glad that he had not
been her lover. Supposing her body had been bound to him so that it
couldn't get away? The struggle had been hard enough when her first flash
came to her; and when she had fought against her knowledge and denied it,
unable to face the truth that did violence to her passion; and when she
had given him up and was left with just that, the beauty of his body, and
it had hurt her to look at him.

Oh well, nothing could hurt her now. And anyhow she would get through
to-day without being afraid of what might happen. John couldn't do
anything awful; he had been ordered on an absolutely safe expedition,