Apparently about forty years of age, madame was of ponderous build, clumsy as a Flemish horse, with massive heaving shoulders, and broad hips. Abundant black hair was brushed back from her face and gathered in a knot on the top of her head. Her sallow skin was partially redeemed by the beauty of her eyes—velvet-brown and fringed with thick lashes. Her full lips were pencilled with a fine line of black down. It was a typical enough face of a daughter of the people, sprung from peasant stock and now the wife of a small tradesman. This was the woman whom Quality feared with his very soul. When he had first rented her apartment, she had reminded him of a woman in a fairy-tale, who, while apparently honest and homely, concealed under her ordinary exterior that element of the sinister supernatural that often accompanies such histories. Thus looked the pleasant-faced female, who afterwards figured as the ogress; thus appeared the harmless peasant, who changed nightly into a were-wolf. It was not his fanciful idea of a composite personality, however, which inspired Quality’s dislike of his landlady. That had come with the knowledge that she was utterly lacking in the usual sentiments of humanity. Undisturbed by any horrors of the siege, and showing neither pity nor fear, she continued her daily routine with the mechanical precision of a machine. The sole interest that she ever showed in her boarder was connected with the weekly note. It was since the War that his distaste had magnified into fear. And his fear was the craven terror of one who, amidst hostile surroundings, carries his very life on a tongue-string. For Fate, choosing her instrument with callous cruelty, had ordained that he should serve his country by means of those subterranean methods, for which the punishment is summary death. Quality now eyed the woman with the oblique glance of suspicion. How much did madame know? Did she merely suspect? Was her inaction a sign of ignorance? Or was she on crouch, biding her time to pounce? Yet through the shifting mists of those dream-days of doubt and fear—when rustling leaves tracked him homewards, and his own shadow slipped away to denounce him—one fact remained real and potent. He knew that all appeal to madame’s feminine compassion would be vain. If she possessed his secret, she would certainly betray him. Again he looked at her, marking, with strong dislike, the rust-red grain of her skin over her cheek-bones, the tight tartan-silk blouse, the stiff linen collar that made her neck appear so dirty by contrast. The room, with its hideous-patterned paper seemed to wall him in alive; the charcoal fumes from the stove to suffocate him. Then, suddenly, he smiled. All this, too, would pass away. Next week, he would rub his eyes and wonder if—somewhere—on some alien planet, there really existed a strange, hostile room, tenanted by an unhuman, sawdust-stuffed woman. Both would dwindle down to a name on an envelope—merely an address.