He threw his arm round her, and, with a tremendous air of proprietorship, almost dragged her indoors. Little gasps of excitement were her show of protest. As they passed through the room below the man could be heard speaking quick words to her, in a voice unevenly controlled; speaking with strange disregard for the public room’s bleak emptiness and for the nearness of those who were sleeping, for the stare of electric bulbs, which, when they shine singly over places deserted till the morning, have so intent an air of watchfulness and curiosity. II On Saturday evening Margaret and Mrs. Fane-Herbert reached the hotel. After dinner, Mrs. Fane-Herbert said to John: “I hear you changed your mind about leaving the Navy.” “It was scarcely a question of my changing my mind. It didn’t get as far as that. You see----” He looked aside and saw that Margaret was watching him. “At any rate, I am settled down to it now,” he said. Hugh broke in with talk of Kamakura. “When does your leave end?” Margaret asked. “Monday.” “You must go back to your ship, then?” “Yes, by noon.” She turned to John. “And you, too?” Something in her intonation caught his attention, and he looked swiftly at her. “Yes,” he said. “You must send us news of London as our share in your home-coming.... I want to hear of your great-grandmother’s welcome.” “Her great-grandmother?” Mrs. Fane-Herbert put in. “The portrait, mother--the one over the stairs.” Then to John: “She’ll give me comments with her welcome, a lecture for her runaway.” There was a hint of bitterness in that; but John’s remembering that conversation on the first evening she had known him stung her with the sting--half-pleasant, half-painful--of childhood days recalled in dark moments. For now she was easily stung to sorrow or to a kind of fierce joy. She had wanted desperately to talk, to tell someone how free she was--Ordith being gone. Untold, her freedom seemed incomplete. But neither her father nor her mother had spoken. They had learnt the facts, accepted them; she had attempted no explanation; not one word had been said. This silence had a hardening quality. Her experience, the vivid remembrance of which might have flowed easily away, was somehow frozen in her mind, like a sin unconfessed. There was no one to whom she could go. Warmth of heart, comradeship, the simplest affection she starved for. But this being left alone, this frigidness of spirit, this intolerable independence.... John had known, at least, that her heart was full. It was as if she had seen a friendly face in the midst of a vast unnoticing crowd. When she said good-night to him she gave him her hand with new confidence. Then, out of his sight, she was suddenly angry with herself as for a foolishness, a weakness for the first time realized. An instant she stood unmoving outside her bedroom door--her mind tripped somehow, taken unawares. And in the morning she settled at once to a book, glad of an occupation so isolating.