She found the old box of candles and placed four in the brackets and lit them.  Then she went over to the couch and looked down upon Franz von Nettelbeck.  He slept heavily, on his side, his arms relaxed but slightly curved.  In a few moments she went down the hall to her bedroom and took a cold bath and made a cup of strong coffee; then dressed herself in a suit of gray cloth, straight and loose, that her swiftest movements might not be impeded.  In the belt under the jacket she adjusted her pistol and dagger.

She returned to the Saal and once more looked down upon the unconscious man.  How long he had been falling asleep!  She had offered him wine, meaning to drug it, but he had refused lest it inflame his wounds.  She had offered to make him coffee, but he would not let her go.

It was in the complete admission of her reluctance to leave him, even after he slept, and while disturbed by the fear that the dawn was nearer than in fact it was, that she stared down upon the man who was more to her than Germany and all its enslaved women and men.  He knew nothing of her plans, had not a suspicion of the revolution, but he had vowed they never should be parted again.  He had great influence and could set wheels in motion that would return him to the diplomatic service and procure him an appointment to Spain; where good diplomatists were badly needed.

It was an enchanting picture that he drew in spite of the horror that must ever mutter at their threshold; but to the awfulness of war they were both by this time more or less callous, although he was mortally sick of the war itself; and Gisela, who doled half-measures neither to herself nor others, had dismissed the morrow and yielded herself to the joy of the future as of the present.  What she had felt for this man in her early twenties seemed a mere partnership of romance and sentiment fused by young nerves, compared with the mature passion he had shocked from its long recuperative sleep.  He was her mate, her other part.  Her long fidelity, unshaken by time, her own temperament and many opportunities, all were proof of that.

The caste of great lovers in this unfinished world is small and almost inaccessible, but they had taken their place by immemorial right.  Were it not for this history of her own making they would find every phase of happiness in each other as long as they both lived.  Women, at least, know instinctively the difference between the transient passion, no matter how powerful, and the deathless bond.

Gisela glanced at her wrist watch.  It was within seventy minutes of the dawn.  If she could only be sure that he would sleep until Munich herself awoke him.  But he had told her that he never slept these days more than two or three hours at a time, no matter how weary.

If he awoke before it was time for her to leave the house and renewed his love-making, her response would be as automatic as the progress of life itself.