We waited then for our orders, looking down from the windows on to what seemed a perfect babel of disorder and confusion.
"We must be at X---- to-night," Molozov told us.

"The Staff is on its way already.

We should be moving in half an hour." We made our preparations.
Trenchard, meanwhile, had had during this afternoon one driving compelling impulse beyond all others, that he must, at all costs, escape all personal contact with Marie Ivanovna.

It seemed to him the most awful thing that could possibly happen to him now would be a compulsory conversation with her.

He did not, of course, know that she had spoken to us, and he thought that it would be the easiest thing in all the confusion that this retreat involved that he should be flung up against her.