, and I
can't go without you, leave you here. Promise!"

She watched him steadily as he said this, her eyes bright in the dusk
and charged with that enigmatic expression of waiting and of knowledge
beyond his imagining. It almost took her breath away at times, this
consciousness of events of which he knew nothing. He wanted her to go
with him to that terrible distant land where already the multitudes,
starved out by the victorious Germans, were devouring their own
children, even carrying their dead back in ships.... And he did not
know.

"Promise!" he muttered, straining her to him. She looked up the dim
dusty road, along which weary hearts had wandered for so many centuries,
and a sudden wave of pity for him swept over her. She saw him for a
moment as a pathetic and solitary being trembling upon the brink of a
tragic destiny, a being who had come up out of the sea to do her bidding
and who would sail out again into the chaos of tempests and war, and
vanish. And it was her sudden perception of this dramatic quality in
their relations that brought about the brief passionate tenderness. It
was her way, to give men at the very last a perfect memory of her, to
carry away with them into the shadows.

"Yes," she said gently, and her strong and vigorous body relaxed against
his as he held her close. "How could you leave me here, alone? _Mon
Dieu!_ We will go!"

And for a moment she meant it. She meant to go. She saw herself, not in
England it is true, but as the central figure in a gorgeous pageant of
fidelity, a tragic queen following a beggar man into captivity in a
strange land of her own bizarre imagining. They stood in the road for a
while, he staring at the stars rising over the dark summits and she
looking up the road into the dusk at a mysterious drama playing away in
the brightness of the future. And then the moment was past, and neither
of them comprehended just then how far their thoughts had gone asunder.

And she was sincere in that exclamation, when she asked how he could
leave her there alone? For she was alone. The young Jew trotted to and
from the town bearing fragments of news, like a faithful dog carrying
things in his mouth, but he had given her nothing as yet that
constituted certainty. She trembled within the circle of the arm that
held her as she suddenly saw herself--alone. She must keep him there yet
a little longer. And as they climbed up the gully and reached the iron
gate in the garden wall, t