. . The war shone on to the lurid, packed, smoke-hazed, rustling audience, the greater part of which was dressed for war. The familiar, steady voice of the announcer threaded its way through the pictures – a curiously menacing voice, threatening to the enemy, yet admonitory to the patriot, and on one tireless note. Through pictures of aeroplanes falling, guns firing, ships sinking, bombs exploding, this voice maintained its polite but hollow and forbidding character.

One studying Miss Roach’s face in the white darkness would soon have become aware that she had not given up her three shillings and sixpence for that for which most of those surrounding her had given up their money – that is, for entertainment. Such a student might well, indeed, have been at a loss to read correctly the feelings betrayed by her expression. From its tenseness, its unhappy and half-frowning absorption he might have guessed bewilderment, sorrow, commiseration for others, loneliness – and he would have been right in suspecting the presence, in some degree, of all these. But the emotion he would primarily have been watching was, in fact, nothing more complicated than the simple emotion of fear. Miss Roach stared at the screen with plain fear on her face – fear of life, of herself, of Mr. Thwaites, of the times and things into which she had been born, and which boomed about her and encircled her everywhere.

CHAPTER TWO

1

IT was a quarter past five in the afternoon, and she sat in the white darkness of the Odeon Cinema at Thames Lockdon.

It was Saturday. Three weeks had passed since she had rushed out from Mr. Thwaites and hidden herself in here, and this afternoon there was no expression of fear upon her face. She was still, however, looking at the screen without seeing what she was looking at. Beside her the American – ‘her’ American – Lieutenant Dayton Pike – sat silently.

‘Her’ American? . . . Yes, she believed she could, in an obscure way, claim him as ‘hers’. In the last astonishing three weeks it seemed that she had actually acquired her own American – just as every shop-girl, girl-typist, girl-clerk, girl-assistant, girl-anything in fact, in the town, had acquired her own.

The Americans had stormed the town. Those two shy Lieutenants who had been in to dinner that night at the Rosamund Tea Rooms had been two mere timid scouts sent on ahead of the reverberating, twanging, banging invasion. Of those two Lieutenant Dayton Pike had been one, and he was no longer timid. He was, indeed, very far from being timid.

‘Her’ American, then . . . But to what extent hers? And in what exact meaning of the word? That remained an enigma. Lieutenant Dayton Pike remained an enigma. He had begun as such, and he remained so.

She had soon learned that he was not as shy as he had appeared that night in the dining-room with his friend.

The next night she had caught an early train from London and had entered the Rosamund Tea Rooms at about six o’clock. He was coming down the stairs. ‘Good evening,’ he said, and grinned at her in the dim light of the hall. She smiled back, and said ‘Good evening,’ and went on up the stairs. But he called her back.

‘Say,’ he said, speaking in a low voice (the dimness of the light somehow caused one to speak in a low voice).