“Should I be enthusiastic?  Should I view the prospect with an old-fashioned Hussar’s hurrah?” he asked.  “The right way is without illusions.  Let us lose our heads, cry out for glory—­and then chaos!”

“The heedless barbarism of ignorance intoxicated with primitive passion versus calculating, refined, intellectual, comprehending barbarism!  I see no choice,” she concluded, rising slowly in the utter weariness of spirit that calls for the end of an interview.

“Marta, you will promise not to remain at the house?” he urged.

“Isn’t that my affair?” she asked.  “Aren’t you willing to leave even that to me after all you have been telling how you are to make a redoubt of our lawn, inviting the shells of the enemy into our drawing-room?”

What could he say in face of a hostility so resolute and armed with the conviction of its logic?  Only call up from the depths the two passions of his life in an outburst, with all the force of his nature in play.

“I love this soil, my country’s soil, ours by right—–­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!