There was a hush in the room.  Ned could see Connie’s full underlip pouted tremulously and her eyes swimming, her hands moved caressingly to and fro.  His face relaxed its passion.  The tears came again into his eyes, also.  Geisner smoked his cigarette, the most unmoved of any.

“If you had only known him years ago,” went on Connie, her voice trembling.  “He used to take me on his knee when I was a little girl, and keep me there for hours while great men talked great things and he was greatest of them all.  He was young then and rich and handsome and fiery, and with a brain—­oh, such a brain!—­that put within his reach what other men care for most.  And he gave it all up, everything—­even Love,” she added, softly.  “When he played the Marseillaise just now, I thought of it.  One day he came to our house and played it so, and outside the people in the streets were marching by singing it, and—­and—­” she set her teeth on a great sob.  “My father never came back nor my brother, and Harry there came one night and took Josie and me away.  We had no mother.  And when we saw this man again he was what he is now.  It was worse than death, ten thousand times worse.  Oh!  Geisner, Geisner!” The head her hand rested on had sunk down.  What were the little man’s thoughts?  What were they?

“But his heart is still the same, Ned,” she cried, triumphantly, her sweet voice ringing clear again.  “Ah, yes!  His heart is still the same, as brave and true and pure and strong.  Oh, purer, better!  If it came again, Ned, he would do it.  Sometimes, I think, he doubts himself but I know.  He would do it all again and suffer it all—­that worse than death he suffered.  For, you see, he only lives to serve the Cause, in a different way to the old way but still to serve it.  And I serve the Cause also as best I can, even if I wear—­” she shrugged her shoulders.  “And Harry serves it still as loyally as when, a beardless lad, he risked his life to care for a slaughtered comrade’s orphan children.  And Ford, too, and Nellie here, and Arty and Josie and George.  But Geisner serves it best of all if it be best to give most.  He has given most all his life and he gives most still.  And we love him for it.  And that love, perhaps, is sweeter to him than all he might have been.”

She knelt by his side as she ceased speaking, and put her arms round his neck as he crouched there.  “Geisner!” Nellie who was nearest heard her whisper in her childhood’s tongue.  “Geisner!  We have seen the dry bones become men.  We have poured our blood and our brain into them and if only for a moment they have lived, they have lived.  Ah, comrade, do you recollect how you breathed soul into them when they shrank back that day?  They moved, Geisner.  They moved.  We felt them move.  They will move again, some day, dear heart.  They will move again.”  Then, choking with sobs, she laid her head on his knees.  He put his arms tenderly round her and they saw that this immovable little man was weeping like a child.  One by one the others went softly out to the verandah.  Only Ned remained.  He had buried his face in his hands and sat, overwhelmed with shame, wishing that the floor would open and swallow him.  From outside came the ceaseless lap-lap-lapping of water, imperceptibly eating away the granite rock, caring not for time, blindly working, destroying the old and building up the new.