The souls of women come, perhaps rather more often than those of men, to steep places down which the least touch will cause them to hurl themselves. Madeleine had been hanging on some such edge ever since the day of the Horse Show. It needed but the stroke of a feather to send her over. Her trance was broken by the sound of field-boots on the steps that led down from the dining-room. Two officers were passing to the door, middle-aged junior officers of infantry or artillery, with cleaned-up, discolored uniforms, and faces and voices of those who had been “through it,” and had a good deal more to go through before they would have done with “it”--“it” being the War. Madeleine had seen hundreds such, going up to the line, coming down from the line, sitting round her father’s table, taking charge of parties of men, with shy resolution. Little given to guessing, she could have told almost of what they were talking--of what they had done on leave, what sort of “show” they were going to be involved in, possibly of the very inn of the “Lion of Flanders” where they might have snatched a comfortable meal in the intervals of sleeping in their clothes and eating out of their hands. They passed beside her and she smiled involuntarily. Her long vigil had not been in vain. All the English divisions were bound to pass into the Somme offensive sooner or later, and there was nothing wonderful in her meeting two officers whom she had seen before. Nor was it because she was feeling the homesickness or the loneliness of the acutely sensitive. But just because the starvation of her Fixed Idea had wrought her up to a point culminating at that moment, she smiled. The shorter, fairer of the two, whose mere name she remembered (for she had that sort of memory, very useful for checking billeting returns), recognized her and spoke to his companion. The other turned. It was Lieutenant Skene, whom she had not seen, or indeed thought of, since the Horse Show. He turned, and their glances met. She saw in a moment that it mattered intensely to both of them what she did, how or why she could not see, but she knew that it mattered. She kept perfectly still, her face molded in a smile. The door clicked. They were alone. Skene sat before her. What had she done? Nothing. By doing nothing she had placed him there.