wn at her face,
I read in an instant the thing she had thought to do. It was one
of those moments when one sees.

"'No!' I said.

"'No?' she asked, in surprise and I think a little fearful at
the answer to her thought.

"'Nothing,' I said, 'shall send me back. Nothing! I have
chosen. Love, I have chosen, and the world must go. Whatever
happens I will live this life--I will live for you! It--nothing
shall turn me aside; nothing, my dear one. Even if you died--even
if you died--'

"'Yes?' she murmured, softly.

"'Then--I also would die.'

"And before she could speak again I began to talk, talking
eloquently--as I could do in that life--talking to exalt love, to
make the life we were living seem heroic and glorious; and the
thing I was deserting something hard and enormously ignoble that it
was a fine thing to set aside. I bent all my mind to throw that
glamour upon it, seeking not only to convert her but myself to
that. We talked, and she clung to me, torn too between all that
she deemed noble and all that she knew was sweet. And at last I
did make it heroic, made all the thickening disaster of the world
only a sort of glorious setting to our unparalleled love, and we
two poor foolish souls strutted there at last, clad in that
splendid delusion, drunken rather with that glorious delusion,
under the still stars.

"And so my moment passed.

"It was my last chance. Even as we went to and fro there, the
leaders of the south and east were gathering their resolve, and the
hot answer that shattered Evesham's bluffing for ever, took shape and
waited. And, all over Asia, and the ocean, and the South, the air
and the wires were throbbing with their warnings to prepare--prepare.

"No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could
imagine, with all these new inventions, what horror war might
bring. I believe most people still believed it would be a matter
of bright uniforms and shouting charges and triumphs and flags and
bands--in a time when half the world drew its food supply from
regions ten thousand miles away--"

The man with the white face paused. I glanced at him, and his
face was intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway
station, a string of loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of
a cottage, shot by the carriage window, and a bridge passed with a
clap of noise, echoing the tumult of the train.

"After that," he said, "I dreamt often. For three weeks of
nights that drea