friend's house. A man had just come over from Holland," he shook
himself as if to dismiss a nightmare. "I did not come here to say such
things. The enormous luck of catching sight of you, by mere chance,
through the window electrified me. I--I came because I was catapulted
here." He tried to smile and managed it pretty well. "How could I stay
when--there you were! Going into the same garden!" He looked round him
at the greenness with memory awakening. "It's the same garden. The
shrubs have grown much bigger and they have planted some new ones--but
it is the same garden." His look came back to her. "You are the same
Robin," he said softly.

"Yes," she answered, as she had always answered "yes" to him.

"You are the same little child," he added and he lifted her hands again,
but this time he kissed them as gently as he had spoken. "God! I'm
glad!" And that was said softly, too. He was not a man of thirty or
forty--he was a boy of twenty and his whole being was vibrating with the
earthquake of the world.

That he vaguely recognised this last truth revealed itself in his next
words.

"It would have taken me six months to say this much to you--to get this
far--before this thing began," he said. "I daren't have run after you in
the street. I should have had to wait about and make calls and ask for
invitations to places where I might see you. And when we met we should
have been polite and have talked all round what we wanted to say. It
would have been cheek to tell you--the second time we met--that your
eyes looked at me just as they did when you were a little child. I
should have had to be decently careful because you might have felt shy.
You don't feel shy now, do you? No, you don't," in caressing conviction
and appeal.

"No--no." There was the note of a little mating bird in the repeated
word.

This time he spread one of her hands palm upward on his own larger one.
He looked down at it tenderly and stroked it as he talked.

"It is because there is no time. Things pour in upon us. We don't know
what is before us. We can only be sure of one thing--that it may be
death or wounds. I don't know when they'll think me ready to be sent
out--or when they'll be ready to send me and other fellows like me. But
I shall be sent. I am sitting in a garden here with you. I'm a young
chap and big and strong and I love life. It is my duty as a man to go
and kill other young chaps who love it as much as I do. And they must do
their b