must go. Whatever happens, I will live this life—I will live for you! If—nothing shall turn me aside; nothing, my dear one. Even if you died—even if you died———'
"'Yes?' she murmured, softly.
"'Then—I also would die.'
"And before she could speak again I began to talk, talking eloquently—as I could do in that life—talking to exalt love, to make the life we were living seem heroic and glorious; and the thing I was deserting something hard and enormously ignoble that it was a fine thing to set aside. I bent all my mind to throw that glamour upon it, seeking not only to convert her but myself to that. We talked, and she clung to me, torn too between all that she deemed noble and all that she knew was sweet. And at last I did make it heroic, made all the thickening disaster of the world only a sort of glorious setting to our unparalleled love, and we two poor foolish souls strutted there at last, clad in that splendid delusion, drunken rather with that glorious delusion, under the still stars.
"And so my moment passed.
"It was my last chance. Even as we went to and fro there, the leaders of the south and east were gathering their resolve, and the hot answer that shattered Gresham's bluffing for ever took shape and waited. And all over Asia, and the ocean, and the south, the air and the wires were throbbing with their warnings to prepare—prepare.
"No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine, with all these new inventions,
477
