don't apply. Why
shouldn't I tell you? You know it--as God knows it."

"I know it as a man knows it. I told you I'd been there."

"Owen--shall I ever be where you are now?"

"I had to die first. I told you my youth was dead. That, Nina, was what
you cared for."

It was not. Yet she yearned for it--his youth that was made to love her,
his youth that returning, a dim ghost, followed her and loved her still.

"No," she said, "it isn't only that."

She paused in her going and knelt down by his half-packed portmanteau.
With her free left hand she lifted up, folded and laid smooth the new
suit he had flung in and crushed. Her back was now towards him and the
door he was about to open.

"Owen," she said, "since I'm breaking all the rules, why can't I go out,
too, and look after you?"

He shook his head. "It's not the place for women," he said.

"Women? Haven't I told you that I'm like a man? I'm like you, Owen, if
it comes to that."

He smiled. "If you were like me, you'd stay at home."

"What should I stay for?"

"To look after Laura Gunning. That's what you'd want to do, if you
were--I. And," he said quietly, "it's what you're going to do."

She rose to her feet and faced him, defying the will that he laid on
her.

[Illustration: She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he
had come to her to say]

"How do you know? And why should I?"

"Because there's nothing else that you can do for me."

She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to
her to say.

XXIX

That was a solid, practical idea of Brodrick's. All that he had heard of
Owen Prothero connected him securely with foreign countries. By the fact
that he had served in South Africa, to say nothing of his years in the
Indian Medical Service, he was pointed out as the right man to send to
the Russian army in Manchuria; add to this the gift of writing and your
War Correspondent was complete. It was further obvious that Prothero
could not possibly exist in England on his poems.

At the same time Brodrick was aware that he had reasons for desiring to
get the long, ugly poet out of England as soon as possible. His length
and his ugliness had not deterred Jane Holland from taking a
considerable interest in him. Brodrick's reasons made him feel extremely
uncomfortable in offering such a dangerous post as War Correspondent to
young Prothero. Therefore when it came to Prothero's accepting it, he
did his best to w