'He wants us to go and stay at his flat--their flat. He and his sister have it together--in St. James' Square. He wants us to go to-morrow. He's going back to Carton. There are two servants there. We shouldn't have any trouble. And you'd be close to D---- Street. Any news they got they could send round directly.' Nelly closed her eyes. 'I don't care where we go,' she said, under her breath. 'He wanted a line to-night,' said Bridget--'I can't hear of any lodgings. And the boarding-houses are all getting frightfully expensive--because food's going up so.' 'Not a boarding-house!' murmured Nelly. A shiver of repulsion ran through her. She was thinking of a boarding-house in one of the Bloomsbury streets where she and Bridget had once stayed before her marriage--the long tables full of strange faces--the drawing-room crowded with middle-aged women, who stared so. 'Well, I can write to him to-night then, and say we'll go to-morrow? We certainly can't stay here. The charges are abominable. If we go to their flat, for a few days, we can look round us and find something cheap.' 'Where is it?' said Nelly faintly. 'In St. James' Square.' The address conveyed very little to Nelly. She knew hardly anything of London. Two visits--one to some cousins in West Kensington, another to a friend at Hampstead--together with the fortnight three years ago in the Bloomsbury boarding-house, when Bridget had had some grand scheme with a publisher which never came off, and Nelly had mostly stayed indoors with bad toothache:--her acquaintance with the great city had gone no further. Of its fashionable quarters both she and Bridget were entirely ignorant, though Bridget would not have admitted it. Bridget got her writing-case out of her trunk and began to write to Sir William. Nelly watched her. At last she said slowly, as though she were becoming a little more conscious of the world around her:-- 'It's awfully kind of them. But we needn't stay long.' 'Oh no, we needn't stay long.' Bridget wrote the letter, and disappeared to post it. Nelly was left alone in darkness. The air about her seemed to be ringing with the words of her letter. 'MY OWN DARLING,--We are just going over. I have found a man going back to D.H.Q. who will post this--and I just want you to know that, whatever happens, you are my beloved, and our love can't die. God bless you, my dear, dear wife.... We are all in good spirits--everything ought to go well--and I will write the first moment possible. 'GEORGE.' She seemed to see him, tearing the leaf from the little block she had given him, and standing in the trench, so slim and straight in his khaki. And then, what happened after? when the rush came? Would she never know? If he never came back to her, what was she going to do with her life? Waves of lonely terror went through her--terror of the long sorrow before her--terror of her own weakness.