Then suddenly she began to cry, because at such a moment the loss of the cakes was truly a disaster and the thought of Queenie alone without food waiting here for her to return from Bucharest was too much after the strain of the afternoon. She caught the child to her heart and told the story of what had happened with Florilor. "Now do you understand?" she asked, fiercely. "Now do you understand how much I want you never--but never, never again--even so much as to think of the possibility of selling yourself to a man? You must always remember, when the temptation comes, what I was ready to do for you to prevent such a horror. You must always believe that I am your friend and that if the war goes on for twenty years I will never leave you. You _shall_ come back to England with me. With the money that I'm going to borrow in Bucharest we'll get as far as Greece, anyway. But whatever happens, I will never leave you, child, because I bear on my heart the stigmata of what I was ready to do for you." "I was not understanding much of what you are talking," Queenie sighed. "There is only one thing to understand--that I love you. You see this golden bag? The man who gave it to me left inside it a part of his soul; and if he has been killed, if he is lying at this moment a dreadful and disfigured corpse, what does it matter? He lives forever with me here. He walks beside me always, because he obeyed the instinct of pure love. For you I was ready to do an action to account for which, when I search deep down into myself, I can find no motive but love. You must remember that and let the memory of that walk beside you always. Let me go on talking to you. You need not understand anything except that I love you and that I must not lose you. I shall be thinking of you to-morrow when I'm in Bucharest, and I shall eat nothing all day, because I could not eat while you are waiting here hungry. It won't be for long. I shall be back to-morrow night with money. You don't mind my leaving you? And promise me, promise me that you won't unlock your door for a moment. Don't let that horrible youth have his way when I'm gone for the sake of a lunch. You won't, will you? Promise me, promise me." "Of course I would never do anything with him," Queenie said. Sylvia held up the ten-franc piece. "Isn't it a wonderful little coin?" she laughed. "It will take us so far from here. Once when I was a very small girl I found just such another." "You were being a small girl long ago," Queenie exclaimed. "Fancy! I was always forgetting that anybody else except me was ever being small." "What a lonely world she lives in," Sylvia thought. "She is conscious of nothing but herself, which is what makes her desire to be English such a tragedy, because she is feeling all the time that she has no real existence. She is like a ghost haunting the earth with incommunicable desires."