'

"'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 Evesham'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, what horror war might bring. I believe most
people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms and
shouting charges and triumphs and flags and bands--in a time when half
the world drew its food supply from regions ten thousand miles away--."

The man with the white face paused. I glanced at him, and his face was
intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway station, a string
of loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of a cottage, shot by the
carriage window, and a bridge passed with a clap of noise, echoing the
tumult of the train.

"After that," he said, "I dreamt often. For three weeks of nights that
dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were nights when I
could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in THIS accursed life; and
THERE--somewhere lost to me--things were happening--momentous, terrible
things.... I lived at nights--my days, my waking days, this life I am
living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover of
the book."

He thought.

"I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the dream, but as
to what I did in the daytime--no. I could not tell--I