the panel of her door. It meant nothing to her
comrade, but to the passing man it resolved itself into an intelligible
and coherent message. For it was in Morse, and to his trained and
adept ear it read: "This--is--Keenan--keep--away!"

CHAPTER XI

THE INTOXICATION OF WAR

It was two days later,--and they had been days of blank suspense for
him,--that Durkin made his way to Frank's room, unobserved. His first
resolution had been to wait for a clearer coast, but his anxiety overcame
him, and he could hold off no longer.

As he opened the door and stepped noiselessly inside he caught sight of
her by the window, her face ruminative and in repose. It looked, for the
moment, unhappy and tired and hard. She seemed to stand before him with
a mask off, a designing and disillusioned woman, no longer in love with
the game of life. Or it was, he imagined, as she would look ten years
later, when her age had begun to tell on her, and her still buoyant
freshness was gone. It was the same feeling that had come to him on the
Angiolina steps, at Abbazia. He even wondered if in the stress of the
life they were now following she would lose the last of her good looks,
if even her ever-resilient temperament would deaden and harden, and no
longer rise supreme to the exacting moment. Or could it be that she was
acting a part for him? that all this fine _bravado_ was an attitude, a
role, a pretense, taken on for his sake? Could it be--and the sudden
thought stung him to the quick--that she was deliberately and consciously
degrading herself to what she knew was a lower plane of thought and life,
that the bond of their older companionship might still remain unsevered?

But, as her startled eyes caught sight of him, a welcoming light came
into her relaxed face. With her first spoken word some earlier touch of
moroseness seemed to slip away from her. If it required an effort to
shake herself together, she gave no outward sign of it. She had promised
that there should be no complaining and no hesitations from her; and
Durkin knew she would adhere to that promise, to the bitter end.

She went to him, and clung to him, a little hungrily. There seemed
something passionate in her very denial of passion. For when he lifted
her drooping head, with all its wealth of chestnut shot through with
paler gold, and gazed at her upturned face between his two hands, with a
little cry of endearment, she shut her mouth hard, on a sob.

"Y