"You've not lost your baffling quality in all these years," he said, and lay silent when he had drunk the warm milk she gave him and while she tidied the floor of the coats that served her for a bed. The letters and the photographs she threw into the brazier and drove them deep into the coke with a stick, looking round defiantly at Michael when they were ashes. He shook his head with a smile, but he did not say anything. Sylvia was really glad when the sound of loud knocking upon the door down-stairs prevented any further discussion of the accident of their relationship; nevertheless, she found a pleasure in announcing to the Bulgarian officer her right to be found here with the sick Englishman, her cousin: it seemed to launch her once more upon the flow of ordinary existence, this kinship with one who without doubt belonged to the world actively at war. The interview with the Bulgarian officer took place in that stark and dusty room where she had argued with Stella for the right to stay behind with her brother. Now, in the light of early morning, it still preserved its scenic quality, and Sylvia was absurdly aware of her resemblance to the pleading heroine of a melodrama, when she begged this grimy, shaggy creature, whose slate-gray overcoat was marbled by time and weather, to let her patient stay here for the present, and, furthermore, to accord her facilities to procure for him whatever was necessary and obtainable. In the end the officer went away without giving a more decisive answer than was implied by the soldier he left behind. Sylvia did not think he could have understood much of her French, so little had she understood of his, and the presence of this soldier with fixed bayonet and squashed Mongolian countenance oppressed her. She wondered what opinion of them the officer had reached, and ached at the thought of how, perhaps, in a few minutes, she and Michael should be separated, intolerably separated forever. She made a sign to the guard for leave to go up-stairs again; but he forbade her with a gesture, and she stood leaning against the table, while he stared before him with an expression of such unutterable nothingness as by sheer nebulosity acquired a sinister and menacing force. He was as incomprehensible as a savage beast encountered in a forest, and the fancy that he had ever existed with his own little ambitions in a human society refused to state itself. Sylvia could make of him nothing but a symbol of the blind, mad forces that were in opposition throughout the old familiar world, the blindness and madness of which were fitly expressed by such an instrument.