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
dream stuff, 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 Capri to Salerno we talked of escape. We
were full of hope, and it clung about us to the end, hope for the life
together we should lead, out of it all, out of the battle and struggle,
the wild and empty passions, the empty, arbitrary 'thou shalt' and 'thou
shalt not' of the world. We were uplifted, as though our quest was a holy
thing, as though love for one another was a mission...

"Even when from our boat we saw the fair face of that great rock Capri--
already scarred and gashed by the gun emplacements and hiding-places that
were to make it a fastness--we reckoned nothing of the imminent slaughter,
though the fury of preparation hung about in puffs and clouds of dust at a
hundred points amidst the grey; but, indeed, I made a text of that and
talked. There, you know, was the rock, still beautiful for all its scars,
with its countless windows and arches and ways, tier upon tier, for a
thousand feet, a vast carving of grey, broken by vine-clad terraces, and
lemon and orange groves, and masse