* * * * *

After long silence, she began to talk in a rambling, delirious way of her months in Bosnia.  She spoke of the cold—­of the high mountain loneliness—­of the terrible sights she had seen—­till he drew her, shuddering, closer into his arms.  And yet there was that in her talk which amazed him; flashes of insight, of profound and passionate experience, which seemed to fashion her anew before his eyes.  The hard peasant life, in contact with the soil and natural forces; the elemental facts of birth and motherhood, of daily toil and suffering; what it means to fight oppressors for freedom, and see your dearest—­son, lover, wife, betrothed—­die horribly amid the clash of arms; into this caldron of human fate had Kitty plunged her light soul; and in some ways Ashe scarcely knew her again.

She recurred often to the story of a youth, handsome and beardless, who had been wounded by a stray Turkish shot in the course of the long climb to the village where she nursed.  He had managed to gain the height, and then, killed by the march as much as by the shot, he had sunk down to die on the ground-floor of the house where Kitty lived.

“He was a stranger—­no one knew him in the village—­no one cared.  They had their own griefs.  I dressed his wound—­and gave him water.  He thought I was his mother, and asked me to kiss him.  I kissed him, William—­and he smiled once—­before the last hemorrhage.  If you had seen the cold, dismal room—­and his poor face!”

Ashe gathered her to his breast.  And after a while she said, with closed eyes: 

“Oh, what pain there is in the world, William!—­what pain!  That’s what—­I never knew.”

* * * * *

The evening wore on.  All the noises ceased down-stairs.  One by one the guests came up the stone stairs and along the creaking corridor.  Boots were thrown out; the doors closed.  The strokes of eleven o’clock rang out from the village campanile; and amid the quiet of the now drizzling rain the echoes of the bell lingered on the ear.  Last of all a woman’s step passed the door—­stopped at the door of Kitty’s room, as though some one listened, and then gently returned.  “Fraeulein Anna!” said Kitty—­“she’s a good soul.”

Soon nothing was heard but the roar of the flooded stream on one side of the old narrow building and the dripping of rain on the other.  Their low voices were amply covered by these sounds.  The night lay before them, safe and undisturbed.  Candles burned on the mantel-piece, and on a table behind Kitty’s head was a paraffine lamp.  She seemed to have a craving for light.

“Kitty!” said Ashe, suddenly bending over her—­“understand!  I shall never leave you again.”

She started, her head fell back on his arm, and her brown eyes considered him: 

“William!  I saw the Standard at Geneva.  Aren’t you going home—­because of politics?”