nse of
awfulness--as if the world had come to an end.

"It was new--and they laughed so! They are killed!" she cried beating
her little hands. He had just heard the same news. Five of them! And he
had heard details she had been spared.

He was as pale as she. He stood before her quivering, hot and cold.
Until this hour they had been living only through the early growing
wonder of their dream; they had only talked together and exquisitely
yearned and thrilled at the marvel of every simple word or hand-touch or
glance, and every meeting had been a new delight. But now suddenly the
being of each shook and called to the other in wild need of the nearer
nearness which is comfort and help. It was early--early morning--the
heath spread about them wide and empty, and at that very instant a
skylark sprang from its hidden nest in the earth and circled upward to
heaven singing as to God.

"They will take _you_!" she wailed. "_You--you!_" And did not know that
she held out her arms.

But he knew--with a great shock of incredible rapture and tempestuous
answering. He caught her softness to his thudding young chest and kissed
her sobbing mouth, her eyes, her hair, her little pulsing throat.

"Oh, little love," he himself almost sobbed the words. "Oh, little
lovely love!"

She melted into his arms like a weeping child. It was as if she had
always rested there and it was mere Nature that he should hold and
comfort her. But he had never heard or dreamed of the possibility of
such anguish as was in her sobbing.

"They will take you!" she said. "And--you danced too. And I must not
hold you back! And I must stay here and wait and wait--and _wait_--until
some day--! Donal! Donal!"

He sat down with her amongst the gorse and held her on his knee as if
she had been six years old. She did not attempt to move but crouched
there and clung to him with both hands. She remembered only one
thing--that he must go! And there were cannons--and shells singing and
screaming! And boys like George in awful heaps. No laughing face as it
had once looked--all marred and strange and piteously lonely as they
lay.

It took him a long time to calm her terror and woe. When at last he had
so far quieted her that her sobs came only at intervals she seemed to
awaken to sudden childish awkwardness. She sat up and shyly moved. "I
didn't mean--I didn't know--!" she quavered. "I am--I am sitting on your
knee like a baby!" But he could not let her go.

"It i