o
forth. And I---- But you have seen my record up to this point.

Nobody could possibly want Constance so much as I did, I thought. But an
astonishing number of persons of infinitely more consequence than myself
seemed to delight to honour her, to obtain her cooeperation. And I loved
her. There was no possibility of my mistaking the fact. I had been used
to debate with myself regarding Sylvia Wheeler. There was no room for
debate where my feeling for Constance was concerned. The hour of her
breakdown in Fleet Street on Black Saturday had taught me so much.

In the face of my circumstances just then, the idea of making any
definite disclosure of my feelings to Constance seemed impracticable.
Yet there was one intimate passage between us during that week, the
nature of which I cannot precisely define. I know I conveyed some hint
to Constance of my feeling toward her, and I was made vaguely conscious
that anything like a declaration of love would have seemed shocking to
her at that time. She held that, at such a juncture, no merely personal
interests ought to be allowed to weigh greatly with any one. The
country's call upon its subjects was all-absorbing in the eyes of this
"one little bit of a girl from South Africa," as Crondall had called
her. It made me feel ashamed to realize how far short I fell (even after
the shared experiences culminating in Black Saturday) of her personal
standard of patriotism. Even now, my standing in her eyes, my immediate
personal needs, loomed nearer, larger in my mind than England's fate. I
admitted as much with some shamefacedness, and Constance said:

"Ah, well, Dick, I suspect that is a natural part of life lived entirely
in England, the England of the past. There was so little to arouse the
other part in one. All the surrounding influences were against it. My
life has been different. Once one has lived, in one's own home, through
a native rising, for instance, purely personal interests never again
seem quite so absorbing. The elemental things had been so long shut out
of English life. Why, do you know----?" And she began to tell me of one
of the schemes in which she was interested; in connection with which I
learned of a cable message she had received that day telling that John
Crondall was then on his way to England.

The least forgiving critics of "The Destroyers" have admitted that they
did their best and worked well during those strange weeks which came
immediately after the inva