ightened
her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it, and to get him away
too.

Yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though
nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and
they had both forgotten the incident.

They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the
weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his arrival.
It moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and somehow he
managed to find his tongue and his best French. The girl leaned across
the stones close beside him. No one was about. Driven by some
remorseless engine within he began to stammer something--he hardly knew
what--of his strange admiration for her. Almost at the first word she
sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him, just
touching his knees as he sat there. She was hatless as usual, and the
sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his
face, "so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must
also like what I do, and what I belong to."

Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. Something
in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew the fear of
embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.

"You will take part in our real life, I mean," she added softly, with an
indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his shrinking.
"You will come back to us."

Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power
coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole
over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its
simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august. He saw
her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous
scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side. Dimly this
shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence.

"You will, I know," she repeated, holding him with her eyes.

They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that
she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. The
mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of
him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the
same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth. An
irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what still
r