re gratitude that made her part
appear in a fresh angle of misery.

"There seems to be a kind of fatality about our relations," he went on.
"I lay awake pondering it last night." His tone held more than
gratitude. It had the elation of discovery.

"Look out! Look out, now!" Not only the voices of Lanny and Feller and
Hugo warned her, but also those of her mother and Minna.

"He is going to make it harder than I ever guessed!" echoed her own
thought, in a flutter of confusion.

"Yes, it was strange our meeting on the frontier in peace and then in
war!" she exclaimed at random. The sound of the remark struck her as too
subdued; as expectant, when her purpose was one of careless deprecation.

"I have met a great many women, as you may have imagined," he proceeded.
"They passed in review. They were simply women, witty and frail or dull
and beautiful, and one meant no more to me than another. Nothing meant
anything to me except my profession. But I never forgot you. You planted
something in mind: a memory of real companionship."

"Yes, I made the prophecy that came true!" she put in. This ought to
bring him back to himself and his ambitions, she thought.

"Yes!" he exclaimed, his body stiffening free of the back of the seat.
"You realized what was in me. You foresaw the power which was to be
mine. The fate that first brought us together made me look you up in the
capital. Now it brings us together here on this bench after all that has
passed in the last twenty-four hours."

She realized that he had drawn perceptibly nearer. She wanted to rise
and cry out: "Don't do this! Be the chief of staff, the conqueror,
crushing the earth with the tread of five against three!" It was the
conqueror whom she wanted to trick, not a man whose earnestness was
painting her deceit blacker. Far from rising, she made no movement at
all; only looked at her hands and allowed him to go on, conscious of the
force of a personality that mastered men and armies now warm and
appealing in the full tide of another purpose.

"The victory that I was thinking of last night was not the taking of
Bordir. It was finer than any victory in war. It was selfish--not for
army and country, but born of a human weakness triumphant; a human
weakness of which my career had robbed me," he continued. "It gave me a
joy that even the occupation of the Browns' capital could not give. I
had come as an invader and I had won your confidence."

"In a cause!" she interr