about without a stick in another month, and then you've got to teach
me all the new dances."

The jigging music of a two-step floated down the corridor. It made
the young man's brow contract, for it brought to him a vision of
dead faces in the gloom of a November dusk. He had once had a
friend who used to whistle that air, and he had seen him die in the
Hollebeke mud. There was something macabre in the tune.... He was
surely morbid this evening, for there seemed something macabre about
the house, the room, the dancing, all Russia.... These last days he
had suffered from a sense of calamity impending, of a dark curtain
drawing down upon a splendid world. They didn't agree with him at
the Embassy, but he could not get rid of the notion.

The girl saw his sudden abstraction.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked. It had been her favourite
question as a child.

"I was thinking that I rather wished you were still in Paris."

"But why?"

"Because I think you would be safer."

"Oh, what nonsense, Quentin dear! Where should I be safe if not in
my own Russia, where I have friends--oh, so many, and tribes and
tribes of relations? It is France and England that are unsafe with
the German guns grumbling at their doors....My complaint is that my
life is too cosseted and padded. I am too secure, and I do not want