She sat beside him impatiently, tortured by her powerlessness to find an
explanation for the hostility that he shed around him. Her eyes pierced
the darkness, and her hands always went the same way, groping forward
timidly, then quickly withdrawing as though scorched when his shrinking
away in hatred threw her into despair again.

It was hard to have to choke down her grief like this, and not burst out
in reproach and tear this secret from her husband, which he in his
misery still interposed so stubbornly between himself and his one
support. And it was hard to simulate happiness and take part in the airy
conversation; hard always to have to force some sort of a reply, and
hard not to lose patience with the other woman's perpetual giggling. It
was easy enough for _her_. She knew that her husband, a major-
general, was safe behind the lines on the staff of a high command. She
had fled from the ennui of a childless home to enter into the eventful
life of the war hospital.

The major's wife had been sitting in the garden with the gentlemen ever
since seven o'clock, always on the point of leaving, quite ready to go
in her hat and jacket, but she let herself be induced again and again to
remain a little longer. She kept up her flirtatious conversation in the
gayest of spirits, as if she had no knowledge of all the torments she
had seen during the day in the very house against which she was leaning
her back. The sad little woman breathed a sigh of relief when it grew so
dark that she could move away from the frivolous chatterbox unnoticed.

And yet in spite of her titillating conversation and the air of
importance with which she spoke of her duties as a nurse, the Frau Major
was penetrated by a feeling that, without her being conscious of it,