titute could do the
trick: the smooth-faced boys with their young ardor and their
letter-perfect training of the parade grounds. Appalled at the thought
of this sacrifice of children, the Commander was said to have exclaimed
with tears in his eyes, "Let them go then--and may God forgive me!"

And they had gone! Gone because there burned in their boyish hearts
this absurd idea that honor is a word of a single meaning: a meaning of
sacrifice. They had gone in the even unwavering alignment of a
competitive drill, closing-up, as those who fell left ugly gaps in their
formation, until those who did not fall had taken the gun which the
veterans had not been able to take.

That had been the honor of his fathers, the honor which he had been
declaring himself too advanced to accept blindly. Suddenly his boyhood
ideals and his mature ideas fell into the parallel of contrast--and
beside that which he had inherited, his acquired thought seemed tawdry.
Of course, charging a field gun was an easy and uncomplicated thing in
comparison with his own problem, but his father would have met the
larger demand, too, with the same obedience to simple ideas of honor.

His own contention had been right and Conscience's wrong. That he still
believed. So the spirit of the French Revolution had been perhaps a
forward-moving colossus of humanity: a triumph of right over
aristocratic decadence. And yet the picture of a slender queen going to
the guillotine in a cart, with her chin held high under the jeers of the
rabble, made the big thing seem small, and her own adherence to code
magnificent.

Slowly Stuart went back and spoke in tones of level resolution.

"To make war on you when you defied me was one thing ... to fight you
when you are helpless is another.... I wasn't fighting you then but the
rock-bound bigotries of your ancestors." He paused, finding it hard to
choose words because of the chaotic things in his mind.

She had confronted him with a splendid Amazonian spirit of war and a
declaration of strength which he could never break, and the cause for
which she had stood was the cause of a cramped standard which he
repudiated. Now she no longer seemed a militant incarnation, but a
woman, softly vibrant: a woman whom he loved and who was helpless.

He added shortly:

"You win, Conscience. I can't accept what you can't freely give."

"Stuart--" she exclaimed, and this time the ring of revived hope
thrilled in her voice, but he lifted