had succeeded in cutting off the poisonous shoot that had suddenly
sprouted from it. The truth of this in the days that followed was
horribly demonstrated.

It was not that they ever again came to the spoken bitterness of words,
for the sharpness of them, once experienced, was shunned by each of
them, but times without number they had to sheer off, and not approach
the ground where these poisoned tendrils trailed. And in that sense of
having to take care, to be watchful lest a chance word should bring the
peril close to them, the atmosphere of complete ease and confidence,
in which alone love can flourish, was tainted. Love was there, but its
flowers could not expand, it could not grow in the midst of this bitter
air. And what made the situation more and increasingly difficult was
the fact that, next to their love for each other, the emotion that
most filled the mind of each was this sense of race-antagonism. It was
impossible that the news of the war should not be mentioned, for that
would have created an intolerable unreality, and all that was in their
power was to avoid all discussion, to suppress from speech all the
feelings with which the news filled them. Every day, too, there came
fresh stories of German abominations committed on the Belgians, and each
knew that the other had seen them, and yet neither could mention them.
For while Sylvia could not believe them, Michael could not help doing
so, and thus there was no common ground on which they could speak of
them. Often Mrs. Falbe, in whose blood, it would seem, no sense of
race beat at all, would add to the embarrassment by childlike comments,
saying at one time in reference to such things that she made a point of
not believing all she saw in the newspapers, or at another ejaculating,
"Well, the Germans do seem to have behaved very cruelly again!" But no
emotion appeared to colour these speeches, while all the emotion of the
world surged and bubbled behind the silence of the other two.

Then followed the darkest days that England perhaps had ever known, when
the German armies, having overcome the resistance of Belgium, suddenly
swept forward again across France, pushing before them like the jetsam
and flotsam on the rim of the advancing tide the allied armies. Often in
these appalling weeks, Michael would hesitate as to whether he should go
to see Sylvia or not, so unbearable seemed the fact that she did not and
could not feel or understand what England was goin