It came into her head that she was losing too much time in this Salle des Pas Perdus! She would have to take the train home! Fivepence! But what did it matter. Her mother had five hundred a year. . . . Two hundred and forty times five. . . . Mark said brightly: "If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred. . . . You say that's ample to give Christopher his chop. . . . And settled on her three . . . four . . . I like to be exact . . . hundred a year. . . . The capital of it: with remainder to you . . ." His interrogative face beamed. She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She understood Mrs. Duchemin's: "You couldn't expect us, with our official position . . . to connive . . ." Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She _couldn't_ be expected. . . . She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right! You can't ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends! . . . It was only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said--to Mark: "It's as if the whole world had conspired . . . like a carpenter's vice--to force us . . ." she was going to say "together. . . ." But he burst in, astonishingly: "He must have his buttered toast . . . and his mutton chop . . . and Rhum St. James!" He said: "Damn it all. . . . You were made for him. . . . You can't blame people for coupling you. . . . They're forced to it. . . . If you hadn't existed they'd have had to invent you . . . Like Dante for . . . who was it? . . . Beatrice? There _are_ couples like that." She said: "Like a carpenter's vice. . . . Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven't we resisted?" His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away towards the pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered: "You won't . . . because of my ox's hoof . . . desert . . ." She said:--she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely. "I ask you to believe that I will never . . . abandon . . ." It was what Macmaster had said. He must have got it from Mrs. Micawber! Christopher Tietjens--in his shabby khaki, for his wife had spoilt his best uniform--spoke suddenly from behind her back. He had approached her from beyond the pulpit of the two commissionaires and she had been turned towards Mark on his bench: "Come along! Let's get out of this!" He was, she asked herself, getting out of this! Towards what? Like mutes from a funeral--or as if she had been, between the brothers, a prisoner under escort--they walked down steps; half righted towards the exit arch; one and a half righted to face Whitehall. The brothers grunted inaudible but satisfied sounds over her head. They crossed, by the islands, Whitehall, where the 'bus had brushed her skirt. Under an archway-- In a stony, gravelled majestic space the brothers faced each other. Mark said: "I suppose you won't shake hands!" Christopher said: "No! Why should I?" She herself had cried out to Christopher: