Warm colors of the incipient spring sunset gave the old Ostend hotel a picture postcard look. Thick brick walls, crawling with ivy, radiated the warmth absorbed through the day. Tamar, chilled by the constant sea breeze, sought the comfort of her temporary home without being much cheered by the expectation of gaining it shortly. Though a Saturday, the day had not been restful for her. Her fingers ached from the ten hours of typing she had to do to gain her release from Europe. Tamar Grant was thirty, a petite woman whose face was pleasant without being memorable. To friends, she was amiable, to strangers, a mask. She found life generally agreeable and drifted easily through it. Her parents raised her in Boston but, being British, they imposed upon her the old country accent and some of its sensibilities. Tamar's wish, after graduating, was to learn from the world. She came to Italy right after college, back in 1932. That country soon grew inhospitable to the likes of her, and she moved to France. Her services as an English tutor were not in particularly great demand, but she made ends meet. Her gains from the seven years spent in Paris and, later, Reims were native proficiency in the language and a French lover. That man taught her much. The war concerned her very little, but her parents worried aplenty. In early May, she gave in to their cabled entreaties and made her way to Ostend to sail for New York. Just then, the city became a trap, as the German advance suspended the regular passenger traffic across the Atlantic. Tamar found herself in a bind, unable to leave and uncertain of the future. Her money would hold for a while, but she got herself employed promptly as a typist for the British Expeditionary Force. She had surmised, correctly, that she would have a much better chance of gaining passage out of Belgium if attached to the BEF, than if by herself as a civilian lost in the turmoil of the no longer phony war. That day, the city absorbed more refugees from Antwerp, and German planes strafed some of the roads. Ostend had not been bombed much, but her hotel did get hit once. The damage was not great, but it created a great deal of dust from the loosened whitewash and broken brick over the facade. As she opened the door to the lobby, a cloud of particles came down. For a second, Tamar saw the sun dogs filtered through the cloud, and then it settled upon her clothes and hair. Some got into her mouth and nose, and she began to cough. When she could open her eyes, the reflection in the lobby mirror showed a pale ghost which resembled a young woman in its general outlines. Besides the ghost, stood a middle-aged bearded man in a gray overcoat. She did not notice from where he appeared. Through she did not cut the most glamourous figure, Tamar wasn't upset at the thought of being seen. Strangers mattered little: they could not embarrass her. Something about this stranger sparked a hope of faint recognition. He spoke with a Canadian accent, but annunciating each word with exaggerated care. Deaf people spoke thus, she remembered. "Are you all right, Madam?" asked the man, then turned his head to look a little to the left of her. As Tamar replied, she realized that he was turning his good ear towards her. She spoke a little louder than usual and her voice echoed in the dark hotel foyer. "Quite fine, thank you," she said, lapsing into the precise accent of her Boston childhood "It's only the dust." "Please excuse me...but your name wouldn't have been Miss Grant once?" asked the man, his eyes catching the light of the sunset behind her. She could not place him in her memory, but the gleam in his eye said that he could place her. She nodded assent. She was still Miss Grant, for her own Frenchman and she had no plans of that special kind. "You haven't changed much, Tamar," said the bearded man with a smile "I recognized you even with all this chalk hiding your pretty skin." At this expression, she knew who he was. The shock of the chance meeting added to her fatigue and she nearly fell. The man saw her knees start to buckle and moved to hold her up. The weakness lasted only a second, then the spring steel was back in her bearing. She looked at the man straight and smiled back, her expression friendly and yet curiously formal. "Scott," she said in a normal tone of voice. He stiffened. She repeated his name in a tone which she reserved for her French lover and, before him, for Scott Metcaw. The man less heard than saw, in the rounding of her lips and the emergence of the dimples, that tone. His face began to relax into a wide grin of gratification. It looked old and foreign to her, with the dark beard making his normally thin, aristocratic visage seem more common and peasant-like. But the manner in which he offered her his arm was not of a peasant. Her eyes sought an explanation of his status, but the overcoat he wore bore no insignia. "Where are you staying?" she asked "Why are you here?" Upon graduating from Peninsular College a year before she did, he worked as a jack of all trades for some obscure picture magazine in Mobile. That publication folded in '33 and, with the cessation of the bylines, she lost track of him. "I have a small flat upstairs," she said, leading him upstairs. "But I go home tomorrow!" The flat, a tiny dark studio, still held a trace of the pre-war comfort. A gas jet provided hot water and kept the damp out of the couch upholstery. A tiny bathroom even had cold running water, by then a rarity in Ostend. They kept the lights off. Traces of the twilight came through the window, and tempting the Fate in the guise of the night bombers would have been unwise. "Have you a place to stay?" "No, Tamar. I just got here. Was to take pictures but that won't happen. Got strafed on the way, and farewell to the camera!" He spoke in short sentences, reminiscent of newspaper headlines. A professional habit, she thought. "Sorry about the hearing," he said, making a sad face which almost made her laugh but for the parental instruction in good manners. "Got close to a six-pounder when it blasted. Should be better in a few days." "You can stay here," she said, without thinking. She looked at the small room, and a look of concern came upon her. Pierre was still her lover, and this room offered scant privacy for two people. As her former lover, would Scott expect to bunk with her, she wondered. As she considered him as a man, she remembered of her own worn state with alarm. "Let me clean up," she said, heading to the bathroom. Washing the dust off with cold water took a long time. Damp hair and cold water splashed on the blouse made Tamar shiver as she returned to the main room. Scott had a bayonet in his hand, and he was shaving a bar of dark laundry soap into a saucepan full of hot water. He turned and saw the goose bumps on her arms. He dried his hands on a rag, stood up and began to empty the pockets of his overcoat. With the warm, comforting wool of Scott's overcoat around her shoulders, Tamar felt better. She was still shivering, but felt comforted by the concern for her welfare. Being in besieged Belgium on her own had by then disabused her of any expectations of courtesy. She turned her attention to the table surface. On it, a bottle of lemonade syrup stood next to several paper boxes, small but bulging with heft. Next to it, lay his wallet, a handful of Belgian and Swiss coins, two pencils and a small British pistol. With that, Tamar was familiar, having seeing similar in her mother's purse. On top of a thick, cloth-bound notebook, lay three empty pistol clips and two more with cartridges much too big for the diminutive Webley & Scott. Her eyes followed to the pan, in which his hands were washing something akin to a metallic jigsaw puzzle. He wore a once-expensive suit, now much worse for the wear. She could see a wooden case with leather fasteners poking from under the three-button vest. "Have you any oil?" he asked. She took a bottle of sunflower oil from the pantry. He poured some into a shallow enameled bowl. "Have you eaten today?" He shook his head, indicating the syrup bottle. "That's all I got with me. Mix with hot water." She did so, setting out a crusty baguette and a wax paper wrap with sliced cheese. He fished out the twenty-odd puzzle pieces out of the hot, soapy water and dried them with another rag. The water ran black from his fingers. After dipping each piece in sunflower oil and removing the excess, Scott laid put them together to form a large, awkward-looking pistol with a thin, slightly tapered barrel. He racked the bolt back, thumbed in ten rounds from one of the clips and stuck the weapon into its wooden case. "Pardon the mess -- I had to clean it before the rust set in." They ate sparingly, despite the physical hunger. The fatigue was a leaden weight upon them, despite the sugary drink and the most welcome comfort of home. The room had finally warmed up a little. He talked about his path, which was she had surmised: magazine, another magazine, then providing pictures to the State Department, looking around Europe for news of interest. That was a queer turn of phrase, and she looked at him closely when he said it. He nodded, confirming her guess. Family? None, he said, his eyes looking past the walls to something past, something painful. Then it was her turn to talk. When she spoke of Pierre, he looked at her as she had earlier looked at him. She also nodded, though in her heart she was far from certain. She had not heard from her man since she left Reims, and his persona had already acquired a sense of unreality about it. She said she wasn't free and was surprised at the look of relief on Scott's features. The periodic fluttering of his eyelids betrayed extreme fatigue. "I ought to clean up," he said "my smell must scare the muck-rats. Should shave, but my hand isn't be steady enough. Don't think I have blades left, anyway." The next morning, Tamar was due at the port for the trip to Southend. To that end, she had toiled ever since her arrival to Ostend. Scott's duties lay somewhere on the Continent, where he would not say. He offered to escort her, even at the price of sleeping in. She accepted, not without some guilt, as the city had become unpredictable since the flood of the various transients hit. Tamar brought a safety razor, a towel and a cup of hot water to the table. Slowly, cringing at the scraping sound made by the blades against the thick bead, she shaved his face. She ran her fingers over the face to verify the results and was struck by the pleasure the suddenly younger face showed. Her fingertips paused, then resumed their tracing movement. No harm in this, she thought. "Where may I rest?" he asked, his eyes still closed. She considered. The chair was hardly comfortable, and besides it, the futon was the only piece of furniture in the room. "We can share the bed," she heard herself say, thinking how scandalized her parents would have been could they but hear her. She heard him exhale sharply, apparently not dozing after all. "I must clean up then." He reached into the right overcoat pocket and pulled out a department store paper bag with a folded union suit. "I have a spare, at least." She thought of the cold water in the bathroom, brought the galvanized washtub from the closet. The tank over the gas jets held just enough piping hot water to fill it half-way, with cold water filling the balance. "Get in," she said. Scott looked up doubtfully. "I won't look at you," she added "Nothing I haven't seen before." He got into the tub, folding aching limbs with difficulty to fit. He was asleep instantly. He woke up only part-way as Tamar washed him, stumbling to the futon with her arm steading his unsteady step. He woke up with a start. Somewhere in the dark, he could hear a muffler cooling, its baffles ticking rhythmically. He opened his eyes but could see nothing until he turned. In front of him, was a woman and beyond her, an outline of an alarm clock. That was the source of the ticking. He could not see the hour. It was past midnight when they crashed, and she was due at the port at six, no later. Scott looked at the peaceful face next to him, framed by brown hair falling to shoulders which were a hint of nakedness, for no straps lay atop of them. He dozed again, though twilight was already aglow. Tamar wasn't asleep, though breathing slowly and barely perceptibly. She felt him turn and guess what he saw. As his breathing returned to regularity, she opened her eyes. By straining a little, she could tell the time without turning her head: five in the morning. She thought about the time they had spent together, and about her man in France, comparing. She dozed off still reminiscing. When she awoke again, she was alone in the bed. Scott was already dressed. He sat at the table, pushing cartridges info the metal charging clips. The rest of his things had already returned to the coat pockets. Tamar looked from the bed, wondering if she should ask him to bring her the dress which hanged behind him. On some reflection, she got out of bed as she was and tip-toed across the chilly floor to the closet door. His eyes ran up her body once, and then she was inside that dress. The locked stares momentarily and both smiled. They had it still, after all these years, that comfort of old lovers. Ten minutes later, they were ready to leave. They would say good-byes then, out of the seashore wind and curious glances. Scott put his arms and his coat around her. Tamar longed for the warm, manly embrace to last, but that was not to be. The ticking of the seconds reminded them of the deadline at hand. Before going out of the door, Scott took out this big pistol and attached its handle to the holster, then let it swing back under the coat-flap on the right. That habit wasn't in evidence last time they met back in Boston, she thought. Of course, she could account for a few habits of her own as newly-developed. The streets leading to the harbor were foggy, with the occasional car headlights showing as yellow glow long before the engines could be heard. The milky clouds overhead were good news, for no bombers would sortie today. Tamar had sensible shoes, and they made good time walking across the worn cobblestones towards the wharfs. She had only a small valise with her. Somewhere far off, the earth shook with the dull reports of artillery. Once, they heard a closer crackle of gunfire, its source confused by the echoes of the ancient town. Scott stopped, crouching deeply, his head scanning for danger. In a minute, he was satisfied that the danger was not too close, and they pressed on. At the gangplank, she showed her papers and was admitted aboard. They hugged once, and then the steamship whistle issued, so he pushed her away. She wanted to stay topside and wave, but the chill of the saltwater spray drove her below. Her cabin was on the pier side, and she stared out of the porthole. She saw Scott's silhouette, receding into the chowder-thick fog. For another minute, his outline was visible, his shoulders swaying in a brisk walk, and then he was gone. As he walked toward his grim work, Scott thought of the coming sunshine. The famous Channel fog would be gone before Tamar's ship would be even under way. Then it would be easy prey for the roving Stukas. He thought of his own task, perilous and touchy. At least he held his own destiny in his hands. Hers was in the hands of the fickle Providence. Tamar, nested comfortably within her tiny cabin, kept her eyes closed. Before her eyes, stood the question which forever defied an answer. She thought to her lovers and wished that she could look a year ahead. As things went, she did not get back to the Continent for five years. By then, no trace of Pierre or Scott remained.