swallowed her too, his voice in her ear said: "You'd gone for ever...."

"I ... I had gone?" She drew her gaze out of the mirror.

The world outside let him down again on to his feet, and he stood
beside her and said gently in her ear: "Will you meet me again in the
Cathedral at four to-day?" She nodded, and he turned away, and she saw
that he was so unknown to her that she could hardly tell his uniformed
back from the backs of those about him.

To meet this stranger then at four in the Cathedral she prepared herself
with more care than she would have given to meet her oldest friend. The
gilded day went by while she did little things with the holy air of a
nun at her lamp--polishing her shoes, her belt, her cap badge, sitting
on her bed beneath the stag's horn, an enraptured sailor upon the deck
of the world. Around the old basin on the washstand faded blue animals
chased each other and snapped at ferns and roses: she lifted the jug and
drowned the beasts in water, and even to wash her hands was a rite which
sent a shower of thoughts flying through her mind. How many before her
had called this room a sanctuary, a temple, and prepared as carefully as
she for some charmed meeting in the crannies of the town? This room?
This "corridor." The passengers, travellers, soldiers, who had used this
bed for a night and passed on, thought of it only as a segment in the
endless chain of rooms that sheltered them. Bed, washstand, chair,
table, rustled with history. Soldiers resting from the battle out there
by Pont-a-Moussons, kissing the girl who lived in the back room, waking
in the morning as darkly as she, leaving the room to another. Soldiers,
new-fledged, coming up from Germany, trembling in the room as they heard
the thunder out at Pont-a-Moussons. An officer--that ugly, wooden boy
who stared at her from the wall above the mantelpiece. (What a mark he