ose rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with
two tall glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice clucking in
them, he still sat as she had left him, and she said, as if there had
been no interruption: "But there is no question of wrong in this case.
I call it a sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there
was one. And I know you will see it just as I do, yet."

He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass
down: "I know you always have the highest ideal. When I differ from you
I ought to doubt myself."

A generous sob rose in Editha's throat for the humility of a man, so
very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below her.

Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near slipping
through her fingers as when he took that meek way.

"You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be right." She
seized his hand in her two hands, and poured her soul from her eyes into
his. "Don't you think so?" she entreated him.

[Illustration: "'YOU SHALL NOT SAY THAT!'"]

He released his hand and drank the rest of his lemonade, and she added,
"Have mine, too," but he shook his head in answering, "I've no business
to think so, unless I act so, too."

Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with leaps that she felt in
her neck. She had noticed that strange thing in men: they seemed to feel
bound to do what they believed, and not think a thing was finished when
they said it, as girls did. She knew what was in his mind, but she
pretended not, and she said, "Oh, I am not sure," and then faltered.

He went on as if to himself, without apparently heeding her: "There's
only one way of proving one's faith in a thing like this."

She could not say that she understood, but she did understand.

He went on again. "If I believed--if I felt as you do about this
war--Do you wish me to feel as you do?"

Now she was really not sure; so she said: "George, I don't know what you
mean."

He seemed to muse away from her as before.

"There is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the bottom of
his heart every man would like at times to have his courage tested, to
see how he would act."

"How can you talk in that ghastly way?"

"It _is_ rather morbid. Still, that's what it comes to, unless you're
swept away by ambition or driven by conviction. I haven't the conviction
or the ambition, and the other thing is what it comes to with me. I
ought to h