“Is love all?” she said, at last.  “Is love all?  Ought one to think of nothing but love when one is settling one’s life forever?  I wonder?  I look about me, Ste. Marie,” she said, “and in the lives of my friends—­the people who seem to me to be most worth while, the people who are making the world’s history for good or ill—­and it seems to me that in their lives love has the second place—­or the third.  I wonder if one has the right to set it first.  There is, of course,” she said, “the merely domestic type of woman—­the woman who has no thought and no interest beyond her home.  I am not that type of woman.  Perhaps I wish I were.  Certainly they are the happiest.  But I was brought up among—­well, among important people—­men of my grandfather’s kind.  All my training has been toward that life.  Have I the right, I wonder, to give it all up?”

The man stirred at her feet, and she put out her hands to him quickly.

“Do I seem brutal?” she cried.  “Oh, I don’t want to be!  Do I seem very ungenerous and wrapped up in my own side of the thing?  I don’t mean to be that, but—­I’m not sure.  I expect it’s that.  I’m not sure, and I think I’m a little frightened.”  She gave him a brief, anxious smile that was not without its tenderness.  “I’m so sure,” she said, “when I’m away from you.  But when you’re here—­oh, I forget all I’ve thought of.  You lay your spell upon me.”

Ste. Marie gave a little wordless cry of joy.  He caught her two hands in his and held them against his lips.  Again that great wave of tenderness swept her, almost engulfing.  But when it had ebbed she sank back once more in her chair, and she withdrew her hands from his clasp.

“You make me forget too much,” she said.  “I think you make me forget everything that I ought to remember.  Oh, Ste. Marie, have I any right to think of love and happiness while this terrible mystery is upon us—­while we don’t know whether poor Arthur is alive or dead?  You’ve seen what it has brought my grandfather to!  It is killing him.  He has been much worse in the past fortnight.  And my mother is hardly a ghost of herself in these days.  Ah, it is brutal of me to think of my own affairs—­to dream of happiness at such a time.”  She smiled across at him very sadly.  “You see what you have brought me to!” she said.

Ste. Marie rose to his feet.  If Miss Benham, absorbed in that warfare which raged within her, had momentarily forgotten the cloud of sorrow under which her household lay, so much the more had he, to whom the sorrow was less intimate, forgotten it.  But he was ever swift to sympathy, Ste. Marie—­as quick as a woman, and as tender.  He could not thrust his love upon the girl at such a time as this.  He turned a little away from her, and so remained for a moment.  When he faced about again the flush had gone from his cheeks and the fire from his eyes.  Only tenderness was left there.

“There has been no news at all this week?” he asked, and the girl shook her head.