`While you're away, I mean, you're sure to come back?'

`I'm as sure as I can be of anything, that I shall come back.'

`Yes! Well! Twentieth of July!'

He looked at her so strangely.

Yet he really wanted her to go. That was so curious. He wanted her to go, positively, to have her little adventures and perhaps come home pregnant, and all that. At the same time, he was afraid of her going.

She was quivering, watching her real opportunity for leaving him altogether, waiting till the time, herself himself should be ripe.

She sat and talked to the keeper of her going abroad.

`And then when I come back,' she said, `I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?'

She was quite thrilled by her plan.

`You've never been to the Colonies, have you?' he asked her.

`No! Have you?'

`I've been in India, and South Africa, and Egypt.'

`Why shouldn't we go to South Africa?'

`We might!' he said slowly.

`Or don't you want to?' she asked.

`I don't care. I don't much care what I do.'

`Doesn't it make you happy? Why not? We shan't be poor. I have about six hundred a year, I wrote and asked. It's not much, but it's enough, isn't it?'

`It's riches to me.'

`Oh, how lovely it will be!'

`But I ought to get divorced, and so ought you, unless we're going to have complications.'

There was plenty to think about.

Another day she asked him about himself. They were in the hut, and there was a thunderstorm.

`And weren't you happy, when you were a lieutenant and an officer and a gentleman?'

`Happy? All right. I liked my Colonel.'

`Did you love him?'

`Yes! I loved him.'

`And did he love you?'