The old man grunted and left her. In her own room she smiled at her reflection in the glass. She was looking magnificent, feeling magnificent. To come from at least some degree of luxury, if not from home and love, at least from entertainment and admiration, to the bleak realities of her daily life, did not daunt her Flemish heart. She unpacked and undressed methodically, passed her hands over that flesh that had been so generously caressed, and seemed rounded and fortified by it, and wrapped herself in the hard-worn bed-clothes, warming them with her vitality. Could Skene, buttoned up in his “British warm,” miles away on the northern railway, have seen her, he might have been attracted, he would not have been harrowed or flattered. She had rubbed off the contact with him by the passage of her hands over herself. She rubbed him off her soul no less easily. She was at her place in the Ministry on the morrow, and save that her appearance of well-being excited desire or envy, created no sensation. Then as the days passed, very slowly, and all the more surely, reaction began to set in. She did not analyze it or express it, but it was there. The old feeling of having been done, cheated! There was the old void--and Skene, against whom she bore no malice, was partial, rather--had tried to fill it and failed. It was not in him. Too, well behaved, too incomprehensible, too English, he had, in fact, not asked enough of her. She would have felt more at home with him had he been subject to those moods of feverish desire and cold disgust that she associated with all that was most admirable in men. For that male perversity which, when it existed in her father and the Baron, in “Papa,” and Monsieur Blanquart, in fact in all men, was the very thing by which war had been brought about, and caused her separation from Georges--when it appeared in that Georges himself, became simply one of his attributes. Her “good child” bored her. Her spoiled, imperious one was what she needed. * * * * * The evenings lengthened. February came, and the Bosche retreat. Marie wrote that she was trying to get back to Laventie, where things were in a pitiable state, but good land must not be allowed to lie waste. They despaired of Marcel. Madeleine did not reply to this letter. The farm and all it had contained seemed very remote. Yet the letter was a comfort; it brought no bad news, and no news was good news. Already, she thought again of nothing but Georges. As for any practical plan to find him, she had long come to the end of the expedients that her not very strong imagination could devise. She just wanted, and waited.