She was looking at him with an unusual intentness, and he turned away in embarrassment, which made her jeer at him to cover her own shyness. "It was just the reverse of embarrassment, really," he said. "But I don't want to spoil things." "By doing what?" she demanded. "Well, if I told you--" He stopped abruptly. "I have a horror of incomplete or ambiguous conditionals. Now you've begun you must finish." "Nothing will induce me to. I'll say what I thought of saying before we separate. I promise that." "Perhaps we never shall separate." "Then I shall have no need to finish my sentence." Sylvia lay awake for a long time that last night in Nish, wondering, with supreme futility as she continually reminded herself, what Michael could have nearly said. Somewhere about two o'clock she decided that he had been going to suggest adopting her into his family. "Damned fool," she muttered, pulling and shaking her improvised bed as if it were a naughty child. "Nevertheless, he had the wit to understand how much it would annoy me. It shows the lagoon is not quite encircled yet." The soldiers who arrived to escort them to the railway station were like grotesques of hotel porters; they were so ready to help with the luggage that it seemed absurd for their movements to be hampered by rifles with fixed bayonets. The English-speaking officer accompanied them to the station and expressed his regrets that he could not travel to Sofia; he had no doubt that later on he should see them again, and, in any case, when the war was over he hoped to revisit England. Sylvia suddenly remembered her big trunk, which she had left in the consigne when she first reached Nish nearly two months ago. The English-speaking officer shrugged his shoulders at her proposal to take it with her to Sofia. "The station was looted by the Serbs before we arrived," he explained. "They are a barbarous nation, many years behind us in civilization. We never plunder. And of course you understand that Nish is really Bulgarian? That makes us particularly gentle here. You heard, perhaps, that when the Entente Legations left we gave them a champagne lunch for the farewell at Dedeagatch? We are far in front of the Germans, who are a very strong but primitive nation. They are not much liked in Bulgaria: we prefer the English. But, alas, poor England!" he sighed. "Why poor?" Sylvia demanded, indignantly. He smiled compassionately for answer, and soon afterward, in a first-class compartment to themselves, Michael and she left Nish.