stood like one transfixed. There was a whispered word, and then
Stafford came back to her.

"You will not need to do anything," he said.

"He is gone--like that!" she whispered in an awed voice. "Death,
death--so many die!" She shuddered.

Stafford passed her arm through his, and drew her towards the door of
the hospital.

A half-hour later Stafford emerged again from the hospital, his head
bent in thought. He rode slowly back to his battery, unconscious of the
stir of life round him, of the shimmering white messages to the
besieged town beyond the hills. He was thinking of the tragedy of the
woman he had left tearless and composed beside the bedside of the man
who had so vilely used her. He was reflecting how her life, and his
own, and the lives of at least three others, were so tangled together
that what twisted the existence of one disturbed all. In one sense the
woman he had just left in the hospital was nothing to him, and yet now
she seemed to be the only living person to whom he was drawn.

He remembered the story he had once heard in Vienna of a man and a
woman who both had suffered betrayal, who both had no longer a single
illusion left, who had no love for each other at all, in whom indeed
love was dead--a mangled murdered thing; and yet who went away to Corfu
together, and there at length found a pathway out of despair in the
depths of the sea. Between these two there had never been even the
faint shadow of romance or passion; but in the terrible mystery of pain
and humiliation, they had drawn together to help each other, through a
breach of all social law, in pity of each other. He apprehended the
real meaning of the story when Vienna was alive with it, but he
understood far, far better now.

A pity as deep as any feeling he had ever known had come to him as he
stood with Al'mah beside the bed of her dead renegade man; and it
seemed to him that they two also might well bury themselves in the
desert together, and minister to each other's despair. It was only the
swift thought of a moment, which faded even as it saw the light; but it
had its origin in that last flickering sense of human companionship
which dies in the atmosphere of despair. "Every man must live his dark
hours alone," a broken-down actor once said to Stafford as he tried to
cheer him when the last thing he cared for had been taken from him--his
old, faded, misshapen wife; when no faces sent warm glances to him
across the garish lights.