I emerge from the dream cold and stiff. It is an hour yet to first light, the fire is dead, my scalp feels numb with cold. The girl beside me sleeps huddled in a ball. I get out of bed and with my greatcloak wrapped about me start rebuilding the fire.

The dream has taken root. Night after night I return to the waste of the snowswept square, trudging towards the figure at its centre, reconfirming each time that the town she is building is empty of life.

I ask the girl about her sisters. She has two sisters, the younger, according to her, "very pretty, but scatterbrained". "Would you not like to see your sisters again?" I ask. The blunder hangs grotesquely in the air between us. We both smile. "Of course," she says.

I also ask about the period after her imprisonment, when unknown to me she lived in this town under my jurisdiction. "People were kind to me when they saw I had been left behind. I used to sleep at the inn for a time while my feet were getting better. There was a man who took care of me. He has gone now. He kept horses." She also mentions the man who gave her the boots she was wearing when I first met her. I ask about other men. "Yes, there were other men. I did not have a choice. That was how it had to be."

After this conversation relations with the common soldiers become more strained. Leaving my apartment for the courthouse in the morning, I pass one of the rare inspection parades. I am sure that among these men standing to attention with their equipment in bundles at their feet are some who have slept with the girl. It is not that I imagine them sniggering behind their hands. On the contrary, never have I seen them stand more stoically in the frosty wind that whips across the yard. Never has their bearing been more respectful. They would tell me if they could, I know, that we are all men, that any man can lose his head over a woman. Nevertheless, I try to come home later in the evenings to avoid the line of men at the kitchen door.

There is news of the lieutenant's two deserters. A trapper has come upon them frozen to death in a rough shelter not far from the road thirty miles east of here. Though the lieutenant is inclined to leave them there ("Thirty miles there and thirty miles back in this weather: a great deal for men who are no longer men, don't you think?"), I persuade him to send out a party. "They must have the rites," I say. "Besides, it is good for the morale of their comrades. They should not think that they too might die in the desert and lie forgotten. What we can do to ease their dread of having to leave this beautiful earth must be done. After all, it is we who lead them into these dangers." So the party leaves, and two days later returns with the crooked ice-hard corpses in a cart. I continue to find it strange that men should desert hundreds of miles from home and within a day's march of food and warmth, but I pursue the matter no further. Standing by the graveside in the icebound cemetery while the last rites are performed and the deceased's luckier comrades watch bareheaded, I repeat to myself that by insisting on correct treatment of the bones I am trying to show these young men that death is no annihilation, that we survive as filiations in the memory of those we knew. Yet is it truly for their benefit alone that I mount the ceremony? Am I not also comforting myself? I offer to take over the chore of writing to the parents to inform them of their respective misfortunes. "It comes more easily to an older man," I say.

"Wouldn't you like to do something else?" she asks.

Her foot rests in my lap. I am abstracted, lost in the rhythm of rubbing and kneading the swollen ankle. Her question takes me by surprise. It is the first time she has spoken so pointedly. I shrug it off, smile, try to slip back into my trance, not far from sleep and reluctant to be diverted.

The foot stirs in my grip, comes alive, pokes gently into my groin. I open my eyes to the naked golden body on the bed. She lies with her head cradled in her arms, watching me in the indirect way I am by now used to, showing off her firm breasts and her sleek belly, brimming with young animal health. Her toes continue to probe; but in this slack old gentleman kneeling before her in his plum dressing-gown they find no response.

"Another time," I say, my tongue curling stupidly around the words. As far as I know this is a lie, but I utter it: "Another time, perhaps." Then I lift her leg aside and stretch out beside her. "Old men have no virtue to protect, so what can I say?" It is a lame joke, poorly expressed, and she does not understand it. She slips open my gown and begins to fondle me. After a while I push her hand away.

"You visit other girls," she whispers. "You think I do not know?"

I make a peremptory gesture for her to be quiet.

"Do you also treat them like this?" she whispers, and starts to sob.

Though my heart goes out to her, there is nothing I can do. Yet what humiliation for her! She cannot even leave the apartment without tottering and fumbling while she dresses. She is as much a prisoner now as ever before. I pat her hand and sink deeper into gloom.

This is the last night we sleep in the same bed. I move a cot into the parlour and sleep there. Physical intimacy between us ends. "For the time being," I say. "Until the end of winter. It is better so." She accepts this excuse without a word. When I come home in the evenings she brings me my tea and kneels by the tray to serve me. Then she returns to the kitchen. An hour later she taps her way up the stairs behind the girl with the dinner-tray. We eat together. After the meal I retire to my study or go out for the evening, resuming my neglected social round: chess in the homes of friends, cards with the officers at the inn. I also pay one or two visits upstairs at the inn, but with guilty feelings that spoil the pleasure. Always, when I return, the girl is asleep, and I must tiptoe like an erring husband.

She adapts without complaint to the new pattern. I tell myself that she submits because of her barbarian upbringing. But what do I know of barbarian upbringings? What I call submission may be nothing but indifference. What does it matter to a beggar, a fatherless child, whether I sleep by myself or not as long as she has a roof over her head and food in her belly? I have hitherto liked to think that she cannot fail to see me as a man in the grip of a passion, however perverted and obscure that passion may be, that in the bated silences which make up so much of our intercourse she cannot but feel my gaze pressing in upon her with the weight of a body. I prefer not to dwell on the possibility that what a barbarian upbringing teaches a girl may be not to accommodate a man's every whim, including the whim of neglect, but to see sexual passion, whether in horse or goat or man or woman, as a simple fact of life with the clearest of means and the clearest of ends; so that the confused actions of an aging foreigner who picks her up off the streets and instals her in his apartment so that he can now kiss her feet, now browbeat her, now anoint her with exotic oils, now ignore her, now sleep in her arms all night, now moodily sleep apart, may seem nothing but evidences of impotence, indecisiveness, alienation from his own desires. While I have not ceased to see her as a body maimed, scarred, harmed, she has perhaps by now grown into and become that new deficient body, feeling no more deformed than a cat feels deformed for having claws instead of fingers. I would do well to take these thoughts seriously. More ordinary than I like to think, she may have ways of finding me ordinary too.