The stranger sat at the end of the table and ate with the tired, quiet soldiers. Now, the landlady was interested in him. Her brow was knit rather tense, there was a look of panic in her large, healthy face, but her small brown eyes were fixed most dangerously. She was a big woman, but her eyes were small and tense. She drew near the stranger. She wore a rather loud-patterned flannelette blouse, and a dark skirt. “What will you have to drink with your supper?” she asked, and there was a new, dangerous note in her voice. He moved uneasily. “Oh, I’ll go on with ale.” She drew him another glass. Then she sat down on the bench at the table with him and the soldiers, and fixed him with her attention. “You’ve come from St Just, have you?” she said. He looked at her with those clear, dark, inscrutable Cornish eyes, and answered at length: “No, from Penzance.” “Penzance!—but you’re not thinking of going back there tonight?” “No—no.” He still looked at her with those wide, clear eyes that seemed like very bright agate. Her anger began to rise. It was seen on her brow. Yet her voice was still suave and deprecating. “I _thought_ not—but you’re not living in these parts, are you?” “No—no, I’m not living here.” He was always slow in answering, as if something intervened between him and any outside question. “Oh, I see,” she said. “You’ve got relations down here.” Again he looked straight into her eyes, as if looking her into silence. “Yes,” he said. He did not say any more. She rose with a flounce. The anger was tight on her brow. There was no more laughing and card-playing that evening, though she kept up her motherly, suave, good-humoured way with the men. But they knew her, they were all afraid of her. The supper was finished, the table cleared, the stranger did not go. Two of the young soldiers went off to bed, with their cheery: “Good-night, Ma. Good-night, Maryann.” The stranger talked a little to the sergeant about the war, which was in its first year, about the new army, a fragment of which was quartered in this district, about America. The landlady darted looks at him from her small eyes, minute by minute the electric storm welled in her bosom, as still he did not go. She was quivering with suppressed, violent passion, something frightening and abnormal. She could not sit still for a moment. Her heavy form seemed to flash with sudden, involuntary movements as the minutes passed by, and still he sat there, and the tension on her heart grew unbearable. She watched the hands of the dock move on. Three of the soldiers had gone to bed, only the crop-headed, terrier-like old sergeant remained. The landlady sat behind the bar fidgeting spasmodically with the newspaper. She looked again at the clock. At last it was five minutes to ten. “Gentlemen—the enemy!” she said, in her diminished, furious voice. “Time, please. Time, my dears. And good-night all!”