" she cried, trying to laugh, offering her own cheek
to him as he stood flushed and confused. Something choked him as he
stooped to her again, touching the fair face with his lips,
reverentially.

"Good-bye!" she exclaimed, her mouth working, grasping his hands. "Our
hearts are with you all up there, but, oh, don't let your good heart
destroy you for no use!" Then she burst into tears and, turning to her
husband, flung herself into the loving arms that opened for her. "It's
beginning again, Harry. It's beginning again. Will it never end, I
wonder? And it's always the best it takes from us, Harry, the bravest and
the best." And she sobbed in his arms, quietly, resignedly, as she had
sobbed, Ned recollected, when Geisner thundered forth that triumphant
Marseillaise.

Her vivid imagination showed her friends and husband and sons going to
prison and to death as friends and father and brother had gone to prison
and to death in the days gone by. She knew the Cause so well--had it
not suckled her and reared her?--with all the depth of the nature that
her lightness of manner only veiled as the frothy spray of the flooded
Barron veils the swell of the cataract beneath, with all the capacity for
understanding that made her easily the equal of brilliant men. It was a
Moloch, a Juggernaut, a Kronos that devoured its own children, a madness
driving men to fill with their hopes and lives the chasm that lies
between what is and what should be. It had lulled a little around her of
late years, the fight that can only end one way because generation after
generation carries it on, civilisation after civilisation, age after age.
Now its bugle notes were swelling again and those she cared for would be
called, sooner or later, one by one. Husband and children and friends,
all must go as this bushman was going, going with his noble thoughts and
pure instincts and generous manhood and eager brain. At least, it seemed
to her that they must. And so she bewailed them, as women will even when
their hearts are brave and when their devotion is untarnished and
undimmed. She yearned for the dawning of the Day of Peace, of the Reign
of Love, but her courage did not falter. Still amid her tears she clung
to the idea that those whom the Cause calls must obey.

"Ned'll be late, Harry," she whispered. "He must go." So Ned went, having
grasped Harry's hand again, silently, a great lump in his throat and a
dimness in his eyes but, nevertheless, strangely c