om a concert, and she gave her love to him,
without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could
do something worthy to _have_ won her--be a hero, _her_ hero--it would
be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be
grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.

"But don't you see, dearest," she said, "that it wouldn't have come to
this, if it hadn't been in the order of Providence? And I call any war
glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling
for years against the cruelest oppression. Don't you think so too?"

"I suppose so," he returned, languidly. "But war! Is it glorious to
break the peace of the world?"

"That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame
at our very gates." She was conscious of parroting the current phrases
of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She
must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a
good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: "But now it
doesn't matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is
gone. There are no two sides, any more. There is nothing now but our
country."

He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda,
and he said with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, "Our country--right
or wrong."

"Yes, right or wrong!" she returned fervidly. "I'll go and get you some
lemonade." She rose 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 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.

He