e out of him;
she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his
forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her
question of the origin and authenticity of his news.

All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the
very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by
any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to
take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect
as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was
peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity.
Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his
nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means
she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that
the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not
know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her
love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him,
without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could
do something worthy to _have_ won her--be a hero, _her_ hero--it would
be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be
grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.

"But don't you see, dearest," she said, "that it wouldn't have come to
this if it hadn't been in the order of Providence? And I call any war
glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling
for years against the cruelest oppression. Don't you think so, too?"

"I suppose so," he returned, languidly. "But war! Is it glorious to
break the peace of the world?"

"That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame
at our very gates." She was conscious of parroting the current phrases
of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She
must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a
good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: "But now it
doesn't matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is
gone. There are no two sides any more. There is nothing now but our
country."

He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda,
and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, "Our
country--right or wrong."

"Yes, right or wrong!" she returned, fervidly. "I'll go and get you some
lemonade." She r