morrow afternoon, haven't I? . . . I can't leave camp twice in one week. . . ."
"You've got to come down to the camp-guard," Levin said. "I hate to keep a woman waiting in the cold . . . though she is in the general's car. . . ."
Tietjens exclaimed:
"You've not been . . . oh, extraordinarily enough, to bring Miss de Bailly out here? To talk to me?"
Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not meant to hear:
"It isn't Miss de Bailly!" Then he exclaimed quite aloud: "Damn it all, Tietjens, haven't you had hints enough? . . ."
For a lunatic moment it went through Tietjens' mind that it must be Miss Wannop in the general's car, at the gate, down the hill beside the camp guard-room. But he knew folly when it presented itself to his mind. He had nevertheless turned and they were going very slowly back along the broad way between the huts. Levin was certainly in no hurry. The broad way would come to an end of the hutments; about two acres of slope would descend blackly before them, white stones to mark a sort of coastguard track glimmering out of sight beneath a moon gone dark with the frost. And, down there in the dark forest, at the end of that track, in a terrific Rolls-Royce, was waiting something of which Levin was certainly deucedly afraid. . . .
For a minute Tietjens' backbone stiffened. He didn't intend to interfere between Mlle de Bailly and any married woman Levin had had as a mistress. . . . Somehow he was convinced that what was in that car was a married woman. . . . He did not dare to think otherwise. If it was not a married woman it might be Miss Wannop. If it was, it couldn't be. . . . An im-
