“Then the end—­then peace is so much the nearer?” she asked.

“Very much nearer!” he answered earnestly, as he dropped on the bench beside her.

He stretched his arms out on the back of the seat and the relaxed attitude, unusual with him, brought into relief a new trait of which she had been hitherto oblivious.  The conqueror had become simply a companionable man.  Though he was not sitting close to her, yet, as his eyes met hers, she had a desire to move away which she knew would be unwise to gratify.  She was conscious of a certain softening charm, a magnetism that she had sometimes felt in the days when she first knew him.  She realized, too, that then the charm had not been mixed with the indescribable, intimate quality that it held now.

“In the midst of congratulations after the position was taken last night,” he declared, “I confess that I was thinking less of success than of its source.”  He bent on her a look that was warm with gratitude.

She lowered her lashes before it; before gratitude that made her part appear in a fresh angle of misery.

“There seems to be a kind of fatality about our relations,” he went on.  “I lay awake pondering it last night.”  His tone held more than gratitude.  It had the elation of discovery.

“Look out!  Look out, now!” Not only the voices of Lanny and Feller and Hugo warned her, but also those of her mother and Minna.

“He is going to make it harder than I ever guessed!” echoed her own thought, in a flutter of confusion.

“Yes, it was strange our meeting on the frontier in peace and then in war!” she exclaimed at random.  The sound of the remark struck her as too subdued; as expectant, when her purpose was one of careless deprecation.

“I have met a great many women, as you may have imagined,” he proceeded.  “They passed in review.  They were simply women, witty and frail or dull and beautiful, and one meant no more to me than another.  Nothing meant anything to me except my profession.  But I never forgot you.  You planted something in mind:  a memory of real companionship.”

“Yes, I made the prophecy that came true!” she put in.  This ought to bring him back to himself and his ambitions, she thought.

“Yes!” he exclaimed, his body stiffening free of the back of the seat.  “You realized what was in me.  You foresaw the power which was to be mine.  The fate that first brought us together made me look you up in the capital.  Now it brings us together here on this bench after all that has passed in the last twenty-four hours.”

She realized that he had drawn perceptibly nearer.  She wanted to rise and cry out:  “Don’t do this!  Be the chief of staff, the conqueror, crushing the earth with the tread of five against three!” It was the conqueror whom she wanted to trick, not a man whose earnestness was painting her deceit blacker.  Far from rising, she made no movement at all; only looked at her hands and allowed him to go on, conscious of the force of a personality that mastered men and armies now warm and appealing in the full tide of another purpose.