Something had been heard outside. Edward had not heard it. Everyone was moving. The assistant ran two stout horizontal bars across the shutters. He had not time to put up the missing shutter. He was driven indoors by the sound of running feet down the street. Even Edward could hear that sound. A strange voiceless whispering of many bare feet. Men and children ran by, all in one crowd, arms bent, mouths open, distorted, breathless faces. They made no sound except with their running whispering feet. The assistant lifted the porcelain figure as one lifts a baby and crouched behind the counter with it. The shopman stood with his eye to a crack in the shutter. Edward and Tam sat on two blackwood stools at the foot, as it were, of a ghost, a blue and green and gold mandarin coat crucified on a screen. There was no sound anywhere. Then there was a faint shuffling. Two soldiers came uncertainly down the street. Their uniform was new to Edward, a mustard-yellow one. They carried their rifles alertly, pointing forward. They walked with a crouching gait. Their faces looked dark and drunken. There was another silence. Then a hum of muttering voices rose from behind closed shutters. “Well, well, better go while the going’s good,” said Tam in a prosaic voice. “Where’s Stone, I wonder?” The shopman made pacifying gestures and tapped his ear. There was a very distant sound of rifle fire. Edward and Tam leaned back against the broad coat. “Better wait here a bit. D’you want me to go on about Emily?” “Yes.” “I don’t know whether you’d want me to tell you that I have been Emily’s lover. Once. Champagne makes her blessedly silly and uncaring ... she sits smiling like a baby then ... she is serene at last. I adore people who are tranquil, who don’t compete ... Emily, gentle, is absolutely perfect. Lucy is always gentle but she is not perfect. She is not—Emily. Well, I suppose I ought to say Emily—plus champagne. You see I tell you this to show that I am not trying to make the best of myself. It became, I suppose, harder for Emily after that. She was bad-tempered often, dull often, after that. Once she cried in public and she talked sometimes pathetically about herself to me—a thing I can’t stand. I am not interested in pathos. I am not interested, I may say, in people from their own point of view, especially women. I don’t see pathos in myself, why should pathos be expected to appeal to me?” “We ought to go,” said Edward. He had seen a picture of Emily crying, Emily with red staring eyes full of tears, crying, behind a wet handkerchief, to find words that might effectively array her grief before a man who was “not interested in pathos.” “Let’s go,” said Tam. “I wonder where Stone is. Excellent person, Stone, what? Always falls on his feet.”