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By Root 8854 0

herself. What she could not have explained was that recently in her picture of Quauhnahuac this house hadn't been here at all! On the occasions imagination had led her with Geoffrey down the Calle Nicaragua lately, never once, poor phantoms, had they been confronted with Jacques's zacuali. It had vanished some time before, leaving not a trace, it was as if the house had never existed, just as in the mind of a murderer, it may happen, some prominent landmark in the vicinity of his crime becomes obliterated, so that on returning to the neighbourhood, once so familiar, he scarcely knows where to turn. But the Calle Nicaragua didn't really look different. Here it was, still cluttered up with large grey loose stones, full of the same lunar potholes, and in that well-known state of frozen eruption that resembled repair but which in fact only testified facetiously to the continued deadlock between the Municipality and the property owners here over its maintenance. Calle Nicaragua!--the name, despite everything, sang plangently within her: only that ridiculous shock at Jacques's house could account for her feeling, with one part of her mind, calm as she did about it.

The road, broad, sidewalkless, ran with increasing steepness downhill, mostly between high walls overhung by trees, though at the moment there were more little carbon shanties to their right, down to a leftward curve some three hundred yards away where roughly the same distance again above their own house it was lost from sight. Trees blocked the view beyond of low rolling hills. Nearly all the large residences were on their left, built far back from the road towards the barranca in order to face the volcanoes across the valley. She saw the mountains again in the distance through a gap between two estates, a small field bounded by a barbed-wire fence and overflowing with tall spiny grasses tossed wildly together as by a big wind that had abruptly ceased. There they were, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, remote ambassadors of Mauna Loa, Mokuaweoweo: dark clouds now obscured their base. The grass, she thought, wasn't as green as it should be at the end of the rains: there must have been a dry spell, though the gutters on either side of the road were brimful of rushing mountain water and--

"And he's still there too. He hasn't budged an inch either," The Consul without turning was nodding back in the direction of M. Laruelle's house.

"Who--who hasn't--" Yvonne faltered. She glanced behind her: there was only the peon who had stopped looking at the house and was going into an alleyway.

"Jacques."

"Jacques!"

"That's right. In fact we've had terrific times together. We've been slap through everything from Bishop Berkeley to the four o'clock mirabilis jalapa"

"You do what ?"

"The Diplomatic Service." The Consul had paused and was lighting his pipe. "Sometimes I really think there's something to be said for it."

He stopped to float a match down the brimming gutter and somehow they were moving, even hurrying on: she heard bemusedly the swift angry click and crunch of her heels on the road and the Consul's seemingly effortless voice at her shoulder.

"For instance had you ever been British attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, and I've always thought a woman like you would have done very well as attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, though God knows how it managed to survive that long, you might have acquired a certain, I don't say technique exactly, but a mien, a mask, a way, at any rate, of throwing a look into your face at a moment's notice of sublime dishonest detachment."

"Although I can very well see how it strikes you--how the picture of our implied indifference, Jacques's and mine that is, I mean, strikes you, as being even more indecent than that, say, Jacques shouldn't have left when you did or that we shouldn't have dropped the friendship."

"But had you, Yvonne, ever been on the bridge of a British Q-ship, and I've always thought a woman like you would have been very good on the bridge of a British Q-ship--peering at the