me; Zoe asked me whether I would mind if she smoked.

How many women in these days would think of doing that? And yet, had
she but known it, I am still sufficiently old-fashioned to appreciate
the implied respect for any possible prejudices which was contained in
her request.

After lunch, I asked her a question to which I dreaded the answer.

I asked her whether, now that the old Colonel had gone to the Somme,
whether that meant that she would be leaving Bruges.

She laughed and teasingly said: "Quien sabe, senor," but seeing my real
anxiety on this point, she assured me that she was not leaving for the
present. The Colonel, she said, had a strange belief that once a man
had served on the Flanders Front, and especially on the Ypres salient,
he always came back to die there.

It appears that the Colonel has done fourteen months' service on the
salient alone, and is firmly convinced he will end his career on that
great burial ground. As we were talking about the Colonel I longed to
ask her how she had met him, and perhaps find out why she lives with
him, for I cannot believe she loves him, but I did not dare.

Strangely enough I found that a curious shyness had taken hold of me
with regard to Zoe.

I said to myself, "Fool! you are alone with her, you long to kiss her;
you have kissed her, first at the dinner-party, secondly when you said
good-bye at her flat," and yet to-day it was different.