I can not tell exactly when--between Mrs. Harbottle and myself--it became a matter for reference more or less overt, I mean her defined problem, the thing that went about between her and the sun. It will be imagined that it did not come up like the weather; indeed, it was hardly ever to be envisaged and never to be held; but it was always there, and out of our joint consciousness it would sometimes leap and pass, without shape or face. It might slip between two sentences, or it might remain, a dogging shadow, for an hour. Or a week would go by while, with a strong hand, she held it out of sight altogether and talked of Anna--always of Anna. Her eyes shone with the things she told me then: she seemed to keep herself under the influence of them as if they had the power of narcotics. At the end of a time like this she turned to me in the door as she was going and stood silent, as if she could neither go nor stay. I had been able to make nothing of her that afternoon: she had seemed preoccupied with the pattern of the carpet which she traced continually with her riding crop, and finally I, too, had relapsed. She sat haggard, with the fight forever in her eyes, and the day seemed to sombre about her in her corner. When she turned in the door, I looked up with sudden prescience of a crisis. ‘Don’t jump,’ she said, ‘it was only to tell you that I have persuaded Robert to apply for furlough. Eighteen months. From the first of April. Don’t touch me.’ I suppose I made a movement towards her. Certainly I wanted to throw my arms about her; with the instinct, I suppose, to steady her in her great resolution. ‘At the end of that time, as you know, he will be retired. I had some trouble, he is so keen on the regiment, but I think--I have succeeded. You might mention it to Anna.’ ‘Haven’t you?’ sprang past my lips. ‘I can’t. It would be like taking an oath to tell her, and--I can’t take an oath to go. But I mean to.’ ‘There is nothing to be said,’ I brought out, feeling indeed that there was not. ‘But I congratulate you, Judy.’ ‘No, there is nothing to be said. And you congratulate me, no doubt!’ She stood for a moment quivering in the isolation she made for herself; and I felt a primitive angry revolt against the delicate trafficking of souls that could end in such ravage and disaster. The price was too heavy; I would have denuded her, at the moment, of all that had led her into this, and turned her out a clod with fine shoulders like fifty other women in Peshawur. Then, perhaps, because I held myself silent and remote and she had no emotion of fear from me, she did not immediately go.