."

He mused darkly.

"How much was there of it?"

He made no answer.

"How many days?"

His face was white and drawn and his hands were clenched. He took no
heed of my curiosity.

I tried to draw him back to his story with questions.

"Where did you go?" I said.

"When?"

"When you left Capri."

"Southwest," he said, and glanced at me for a second. "We went in a
boat."

"But I should have thought an aeroplane?"

"They had been seized."

I questioned him no more. Presently I thought he was beginning again. He
broke out in an argumentative monotone:

"But why should it be? If, indeed, this battle, this slaughter and
stress IS life, why have we this craving for pleasure and beauty? If
there IS no refuge, if there is no place of peace, and if all our dreams
of quiet places are a folly and a snare, why have we such dreams? Surely
it was no ignoble cravings, no base intentions, had brought us to this;
it was Love had isolated us. Love had come to me with her eyes and robed
in her beauty, more glorious than all else in life, in the very shape
and colour of life, and summoned me away. I had silenced all the voices,
I had answered all the questions--I had come to her. And suddenly there
was nothing but War and Death!"

I had an inspiration. "After all," I said, "it could have been only a
dream."

"A dream!" he cried, flaming upon me, "a dream--when even now--"

For the first time he became animated. A faint flush crept into his
cheek. He raised his open hand and clenched it, and dropped it to his
knee. He spoke, looking away from me, and for all the rest of the time
he looked away. "We are but phantoms," he said, "and the phantoms of
phantoms, desires like cloud shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the
wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries
the shadow of its lights, so be it! But one thing is real and certain,
one thing is no dreamstuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre
of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether
vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead
together!

"A dream! How can it be a dream, when it drenched a living life with
unappeasable sorrow, when it makes all that I have lived for and cared
for, worthless and unmeaning?

"Until that very moment when she was killed I believed we had still a
chance of getting away," he said. "All through the night and morning
that we sailed across the sea from Cap