repeated, looking into her eyes. He paused. Then he said:

‘UND IHR HERR GEMAHL, WIE ALT IS ER?’

‘Who?’ asked Gudrun.

‘Your husband,’ said Ursula, with a certain irony.

‘I haven’t got a husband,’ said Gudrun in English. In German she answered,

‘He is thirty-one.’

But Loerke was watching closely, with his uncanny, full, suspicious eyes. Something in Gudrun seemed to accord with him. He was really like one of the ‘little people’ who have no soul, who has found his mate in a human being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated by him, fascinated, as if some