Felix was well aware of his foolishness in having made of his quiet love for Ann, during these last years, a sort of home; and he did not rate as high as Mildred did, indeed he did not rate at all, his chances of ever now having Ann. Ann, when he first met her, was already Randall's wife, and he» had in the earlier time regarded her with an admiring affection which was in no way out of the ordinary. She had seemed to him, somehow, the ideal English woman, and he had been used to say vaguely to himself that he would like to marry someone like her. The years passed, and it became unobtrusively evident that Ann was not happily married; and with an increasing interest in the situation Felix began to realize that what he wanted was not someone like Ann, but Ann. It was of course, he realized, a most improper ambition as well as a foolish one. The fact that a woman's husband is thoroughly unsatisfactory — and Felix regarded Randall as a four-letter man of the first order — does not justify others in paying their attentions to her. Ann was married, and Felix, from the depths of his conventional honourable soul, took the full measure of the great institution which confronted him. He could not, however, at any point quite make up his mind to sheer off. He was fairly certain that Ann in some undefined way cared for him, even perhaps, however vaguely, needed him. He watched with pity and with fascination, and at last with hope, the progressive?degringolade? of Randall’s relations with his wife. He asked no questions about the future. He waited. And he made of his strange friendship with Ann a place of security, a sort of permanent house, an English house for a wandering man, a place where his valued things could be stored in safety. He had come to depend on this.

Felix was not as innocent of sexual experience as his clever sister, with a rare naivety which rather touched Felix, seemed to imagine. He had known, in various parts of the world, plenty of women. These relationships, with something of the brutality of the soldier and the complacency of the sahib, he made comparatively little of, though he was sometimes troubled by general pangs of conscience concerning fornication. Felix was a church-goer and a communicant, maintaining the unreflective unemotional traditional Christianity in which he had been brought up, and which was vaguely connected in his mind with the Brigade and the Queen. He felt he ought not to go to bed with women he was not married to; yet when he was seriously tempted he usually succumbed, especially in hot climates. But in some separate place in his mind he had kept his intention to marry, in the end, an English girl; an intention which gradually merged into his rather hopeless attachment to Ann.

But then of course there had been Marie-Laure Auboyer. Felix hoped he had succeeded in putting Mildred off the scent as far as Marie-Laure was concerned, for Mildred went on and on as soon as she got an idea into her head, and Felix was feeling rather sensitive and worried about Marie-Laure. He had met her in Singapore, where she was working in the French consulate and he was Intelligence adviser to the C.-in-C. Felix spoke fluent French, and when he was not away visiting Australia or India or Hong Kong he had spent a lot of his time with the French colony. Marie-Laure had fallen in love with him instantly. Felix was used to impressing girls and did not at first notice her very much. He took her out occasionally, in a rather routine way, as he took out one or two other girls to dance at Prince's or to swim at the Tanglin or to drink at the Cockpit or to dine at the Raffles grill, and they were witty in French together about various subjects not excluding Marie-Laure's attachment, which he found she was able to treat with a satisfactory dryness. She was, certainly an intelligent girl.

Then he began to want rather badly to go to bed with her. This was, just at that time, not easy, as she shared a flat with a SABENA airline typist of domestic habits, and he himself lived in the Senior Officers' Mess, a rather grim place presided over in effect by the Head Matron of the military hospital, who was herself a full Colonel. At length the typist went on leave and Felix got what he wanted. He was shaken by it. Once he had gained possession of Marie-Laure he saw her in a different light. Her very touching beauty and tenderness combined with the highly intelligent way in which she dealt with him, her developed sense of the strategy and tactics of love, impressed him and began to attach him. But then he began to feel afraid.

The period that followed, during which Felix's departure from Singapore became imminent, seemed in his memory to drip with colours almost too vivid to bear. There was something drugged about it, something over-rich. It seemed as if at that time it was always moonlight, the hot moonlight nights as bright as day, and that he was eternally in evening-dress wandering slightly drunk with Marie-Laure through endless gardens with lights hanging from the frangipani whose great lotus-like flowers gave out an overwhelming powdery fragrance, attracting white furry moths the size of sparrows. Or else he was lying endlessly with Marie-Laure upon her bed — the SABENA typist had inevitably by now been confided in — while the devastating rain beat down outside and the sweat poured quietly off their momentarily disjoined bodies. It was a time on which Felix looked back with an agitated fascination and many misgivings. He had never so entirely surrendered to a woman. He did not approve.

He had never, during this time, said anything to Marie-Laure which could lead her to regard this episode as more than ephemeral; and it was only her clever gentleness and tact which prevented him from feeling a cad. But he was aware of how far his behaviour must seem to commit him, and he knew that she hoped. When the time came for him to go he had not had the heart entirely to crush these hopes. They parted as people who would meet again; and when Felix asked himself whether he had, out of misplaced kindness, misled her, he found himself wondering whether his concern not to hurt her feelings did not rather mask from him some deep desire of his own somehow, somewhere to be with Marie-Laure again. He shook his head over this and decided he must be firm with himself. He did not want to be seriously entangled with a French girl. He was not really in love with Marie-Laure, he thought, not quietly and deeply and with all his soul in love, as he could be with an English girl. There was a whole area of his being which could not communicate with Marie-Laure at all. And that brought him back to the problem of Ann, which he found, on his return to England, had moved several stages further on, and at once claimed all his attention.

When Felix had left Singapore it had been fairly certain that his next post would be in India. He was designated to be the Military Adviser to the U. K. High Commissioner in Delhi, liaison officer with the Indian Anny, watching the interests of British Gurkhas in India, and for relations with Nepal. It was a job that attracted him. He had already, as Colonel of Intelligence; visited the Headquarters of British Gurkhas in India, in the old Barrackpore Cantonment at Calcutta, and as a soldier and as a man his imagination had been caught. He looked forward to India; and it had been with mixed feelings, of which irritation formed at first the major part, that he had learned soon after his return to England that Marie-Laure had got herself transferred to the French Embassy at Delhi. He soon forgave her; but by then he had become far more concerned about Ann and the image of Marie-Laure began to fade.

Briefed by Mildred, he had attempted to make a sober estimate of the possible outcome of the situation upon which his fate must depend. Would Randall go or wouldn't he? Would he, exasperatingly, go only partly, go, but not quite enough? If he went off openly, entirely, irrevocably, Felix would feel free to act. But short of that he must hesitate, he must hold his hand. Felix shied away from the thought of stealing another man's wife. That was an action he could not perform. If the man abandoned his wife, that was another matter. But would he?