Chance

What came next was a German family, the continental acquaintances of the

wife of one of Fyne's colleagues in the Home Office. Flora of the

enigmatical glances was dispatched to them without much reflection. As

it was not considered absolutely necessary to take them into full

confidence, they neither expected the girl to be specially cheerful nor

were they discomposed unduly by the indescribable quality of her glances.

The German woman was quite ordinary; there were two boys to look after;

they were ordinary, too, I presume; and Flora, I understand, was very

attentive to them. If she taught them anything it must have been by

inspiration alone, for she certainly knew nothing of teaching. But it

was mostly "conversation" which was demanded from her. Flora de Barral

conversing with two small German boys, regularly, industriously,

conscientiously, in order to keep herself alive in the world which held

for her the past we know and the future of an even more undesirable

quality--seems to me a very fantastic combination. But I believe it was

not so bad. She was being, she wrote, mercifully drugged by her task.

She had learned to "converse" all day long, mechanically, absently, as if

in a trance. An uneasy trance it must have been! Her worst moments were

when off duty--alone in the evening, shut up in her own little room, her

dulled thoughts waking up slowly till she started into the full

consciousness of her position, like a person waking up in contact with

something venomous--a snake, for instance--experiencing a mad impulse to

fling the thing away and run off screaming to hide somewhere.

At this period of her existence Flora de Barral used to write to Mrs.

Fyne not regularly but fairly often. I don't know how long she would

have gone on "conversing" and, incidentally, helping to supervise the

beautifully stocked linen closets of that well-to-do German household, if

the man of it had not developed in the intervals of his avocations (he

was a merchant and a thoroughly domesticated character) a psychological

resemblance to the Bournemouth old lady. It appeared that he, too,

wanted to be loved.

He was not, however, of a conquering temperament--a kiss-snatching, door-

bursting type of libertine. In the very act of straying from the path of

virtue he remained a respectable merchant. It would have been perhaps

better for Flora if he had been a mere brute. But he set about his

sinister enterprise in a sentimental, cautious, almost paternal manner;

and thought he would be safe with a pretty orphan. The girl for all her

experience was still too innocent, and indeed not yet sufficiently aware

of herself as a woman, to mistrust these masked approaches. She did not

see them, in fact. She thought him sympathetic--the first expressively

sympathetic person she had ever met. She was so innocent that she could

not understand the fury of the German woman. For, as you may imagine,

the wifely penetration was not to be deceived for any great length of

time--the more so that the wife was older than the husband. The man with

the peculiar cowardice of respectability never said a word in Flora's

defence. He stood by and heard her reviled in the most abusive terms,

only nodding and frowning vaguely from time to time. It will give you

the idea of the girl's innocence when I say that at first she actually

thought this storm of indignant reproaches was caused by the discovery of

her real name and her relation to a convict. She had been sent out under

an assumed name--a highly recommended orphan of honourable parentage. Her

distress, her burning cheeks, her endeavours to express her regret for

this deception were taken for a confession of guilt. "You attempted to

bring dishonour to my home," the German woman screamed at her.