h. I wonder if it is not always so, that higher knowledge
begins with the end of reasoning.'

For a couple of minutes neither spoke, and his head was throbbing with
anvil-beats. Twice she started to speak, but stopped each time as though
distrustful of her own words.

'I am going back to America, Elise.' His dreamy eyes were gazing beyond
her into the distance, or he might have noted that the colour in her
cheeks fluctuated suddenly and the fingers on her gloves tightened.

'Why?' There was nothing in her voice to indicate anything but casual
interest.

'I must go back,' he said, leaning towards her--'back to my own country.
You don't understand. . . . There comes a moment when every fibre of a
man's being craves for his own people, for the very air that he breathed
as a boy. All these wasted months and last night's climax of damnable
murder have left me dazed. I am floundering hopelessly--but at home I
shall be able to clear my mind of its mists and see this whole thing as
it really is.'

A wall of pain pressed against his head, and his face went gray with
agony. In an instant she was standing over him arranging his pillows,
and soothing his temples with the gentle pressure of her hands.

For the first time in many months he knew the help and compassion of a
woman--and the woman was Elise. He was weak from loss of blood, weary
from the long travail of the mind, and her presence, with its indefinable
fragrance of clover and morning flowers, was as exquisite music to his
senses.

'If you only knew,' he murmured, 'how I have longed for this moment. It
has been very lonely for me--and I have wanted you so much, Elise. God!
I've wanted you until I had to struggle to keep from crying out your name
in the very streets. Forgive me talking like this.' He groped for her
hand and held it tightly in his. 'I never had any right to tell you what
you meant to me--and less now than before--but when I come back'----

'You will never come back.' She laughed with a strange tremulousness,
but in her eyes there was something of the scorn she had shown towards
him at Roselawn.

'You are wrong,' he said; 'I must'----

'You are an American,' she answered quickly, 'and that comes first with
you. Your country has nothing to do with this war, and you are going
back to it. You will stay there. I know you will.'

With his old decisive mannerism he sat up, and his eyes flashed with
vigour.

'I will come back,' he s