t understand," he replied, "why you thought in Petrograd that
you loved me and then--so soon--found that you did not--so soon."

He looked at her and then lowered his eyes.

"What do you know or I know?" she suddenly asked him impetuously. "Are
we not both always thinking that things will be so fine--_seichass_--and
then they are not. How could we be happy together when we are both so
ignorant? Ah, you know, John, _you know_ that happy together we could
never be."

He looked at her clearly and without hesitation.

"I was very stupid," he said. "I thought that because I had come into
a big thing I would be big myself. It is not so; I am the same person
as I was in England. I have not changed at all and I shall never
change ... only in this one thing that whether you go from me or
whether you stay I shall never love anybody but you. All men say that,
I know," he added, "but there are not many men who have had so little
in their lives as I, and so perhaps it means more with me than it does
with others."

She made no reply to him. She had not, I believe, heard him. She said,
as though she were speaking to herself: "If we had not come, John, if
we had stayed in Petrograd, anything might have been. But here there
is something more than people. I don't know whether I love or hate any
one. I cannot marry you or any man until this is all over."

"And then," he interrupted passionately, touching her sleeve with his
hand. "After the war? Perhaps--again, you will--"

She took his hand in hers, looking at him as though she were suddenly
seeing him for the first time:

"No--_you_, John, never. In Petrograd I didn't know what this could
be--no idea--none. And now that I'm here I can think of nothing else
than what I'm going to find. There is something here that I'd be
afraid of if I let myself be and that's what I love. What will happen
when I meet it? Shall I feel fear or no? And so, too, if there were a
man whom I feared...."

"Semyonov!" Trenchard cried.

She looked at him and did not answer. He caught her hand urgently.
"No, Marie, no--any one but Semyonov. It doesn't matter about me. But
you _must_ be happy--you _must_ be. Nothing else--and he won't make
you. He isn't--"

"Happy!" she answered scornfully. "I don't want to be happy. _That_
isn't it. But to be sure that one's not afraid--" (She repeated to
herself several times _Hrabrost_--the Russian for "bravery.") "That is
more than you, John, or than I or than--"