her.

She had never suspected it, and the secret should remain his own. Love
and love-making were two very different things. She did not know that
now, but later on she would, when she was ten years older, perhaps, and
then it would not matter to him, for he would be under two or three
feet of snow in a Siberian convict settlement.

He had gone about persuading himself that she was still a child, and
this Austrian boy, this wastrel and dreamer, had awakened her.

It was no use wasting time in sentiment and regrets. _A la Guerre,
comme a la Guerre_. The episode was finished.

He would have work enough to divert his mind soon. There was nothing
left to him now but the Cause.

He would see Sobrenski to-morrow, and hurry on all arrangements for
departure.

After all, as he had once told Arithelli, in any venture it is only the
first step that counts.

CHAPTER XVIII

"Would I lose you now? Would I take you then?
If I lose you now that my heart has need,
And come what may after death to men,
What thing worth this will the dead years breed?"
THE TRIUMPH OF TIME.

Three days later the early morning post brought Arithelli a letter.

She sat up in bed eagerly to receive it, and with the heaviness of
sleep still upon her eyes. As she read, the lace at her throat
trembled with her quickened breathing, and her heart called back an
answer to the tender, reckless phrases.

Vardri was idealist as well as lover, and graceful turns of expression
came to his pen readily and without effort. In many pages of
characteristic, hurried, irregular writing he set forth wild and
unpractical schemes for their future.

He urged her to take the dangerous step of leaving Barcelona and
cutting herself free of the bonds of her allegiance to the Cause.

If there was risk in going, he wrote, there was infinitely more risk in
remaining.

If he abandoned his political views it was more than likely that his
father would receive him. Their quarrel and parting four years ago had
been solely on those grounds, and he was the only son, and there were
large estates to be inherited.

If it were the price of gaining her he was prepared to renounce all his
theories, socialist and revolutionist.

He had been able to save a little money lately, enough for their
journey to Austria. He was sure of a welcome among the officials and
work-people of his former home. The wife of the steward had been his
mother'