ht to avoid this meeting, knowing all the time that it was
inevitable. I've tried to persuade myself that it would be kinder to
leave you in ignorance----"

"Of what?" She strove to subdue her apprehension. Her profile showed
pale and expressionless, as if chiseled in the solid wall of darkness.

"In ignorance of his grandeur."

He had said the thing most remote from what she had expected. He was
aware of her relieved suspense--at the same time of her gentle
skepticism. He felt irritated with himself at his choice of words.
Grandeur did not express the meaning he had intended. When he made a new
start, he stumbled his way gropingly, confused by his consciousness of
her unuttered doubts.

"Why I have to tell you this I can hardly say. It's not for his sake.
It's certainly not for mine. It's for yours, I fancy. Yes, I'm sure. By
doing him justice I shall be able to help you, though I have no reason
for supposing that you stand in need of help. It's to do him justice
that he's been urging me. Yet why should he have selected me to be his
spokesman? I wasn't his friend. I never met him till I reached the
Front; out there I really never knew him. No one did. He was like a
sleep-walker--a very silent man. You'll be wondering why, if this was
the case, I should be so impertinent as to mention his name to you--to
you of all persons, who can claim to have known him infinitely more
intimately than any one else. And you'll be wondering why, after two
months of procrastinating, I motored through the night from London to
force my way into your privacy, without forewarning or introduction. If
I'm going to be honest, I must run the risk of appearing absurd. I could
resist him no longer. He coerced me with ill-luck. Ever since I entered
your sister's house and discovered who you were, he's been urging----"

"Who I _was_!" Her head turned slowly. It was her first intense display
of interest.

"I mean your relation to him--that it was you who were his wife. At the
Front I didn't know that he was Lord Dawn; he'd blotted out his
identity. He was merely gun-fodder like the rest of us--something to be
sent over the top to be smashed and then to be left to sink into the
mud or else hurried back to be patched up in hospital. He was a
company-commander in my battalion. I knew nothing of his past. My
acquaintance with him began and ended in the trenches. I don't know much
now--only what Maisie's told me." He had been speaking with growing