t---and I love you! I
would be true to both!"

"Love! What mockery to mention that now!" she cried chokingly. "It's
monstrous!"

"I--I--" He was making an effort to keep his nerves under control.

This time the stiffening elbow failed. With a lurching abruptness he
swung his right hand around and seized the wrist of that trembling,
injured hand that would not be still. She could not fail to notice the
movement, and the sight was a magic that struck anger out of her.

"Lanny, I am hurting you!" she cried miserably.

"A little," he said, will finally dominant over its servant, and he was
smiling as when, half stunned and in agony--and ashamed of the fact--he
had risen from the debris of cloth and twisted braces. "It's all
right," he concluded.

She threw back her arms, her head raised, with a certain abandon as if
she would bare her heart.

"Lanny, there have been moments when I would have liked to fly to your
arms. There have been moments when I have had the call that comes to
every woman in answer to a desire. Yet I was not ready. When I really go
it must be in a flame, in answer to your flame!"

"You mean--I--."

But if the flame were about to burst forth she smothered it in the
spark.

"And all this has upset me," she went on incoherently. "We've both been
cruel without meaning to be, and we're in the shadow of a nightmare; and
next time you come perhaps all the war talk will be over and--oh, this
is enough for to-day!"

She turned quickly in veritable flight and hurried toward the house. At
the bend of the path she wheeled and stood facing him, a hand tossed up
and opening and closing as if she had caught a shaft of sunshine and let
it go again. Thus she would wave to him from the veranda as he came up
the terrace steps. Indelible to him this picture, radiant of a
versatile, impressionable vitality, of capacities yet unsounded, of a
downright sincerity of impulses, faiths, and ideals which might buffet
her this way and that over a strange course. A woman unafraid of
destiny; a woman too objective yet to know herself!

"If it ever comes," she called, "I'll let you know! I'll fly to you in a
chariot of fire bearing my flame--I am that bold, that brazen, that
reckless! For I am not an old maid yet. They've moved the age limit up
to thirty. But you can't drill love into me as you drill discipline into
armies--no, no more than I can argue peace into armies!"

For a while, motionless, Lanstron watched the