Stella Croyle was at this date twenty-six years old; and it was difficult to picture her any older.  Partly because of her vivid colouring and because she was abrim with life; partly because in her straightness of limb and the clear treble of her voice, she was boyish.  “What a pretty boy she would make!” was the first thought until you noticed the slim delicacy of her hands and feet, the burnish of gold on the dark wealth of her hair, the fine chiselling of brow and nose and chin.  Then it was seen that she was all woman.  She was tall and yet never looked tall.  It seemed that you could pick her up with a finger, but try and she warned you of the weakness of your arm.  She was a baffling person.  She ran and walked with the joyous insolence of eighteen, yet at any moment some veil might be rolled up in her eyes and face to show you for one tragic instant a Lady of Sorrows.

She leaned towards Luttrell, and as Hardiman had foreseen the perfume of her hair stormed his senses.

“Tell me!” she breathed, and Luttrell, with his arguments and reasons cut and dried and conned over pat for delivery, began nevertheless to babble.  There were the Olympic Games.  She herself must have seen how they were fatal to their own purpose.  Troubles were coming—­battles behind the troubles.  All soldiers knew!  They knew this too—­the phrase of a young Lieutenant-Colonel lecturing at the Staff College.

“Battles are not won either by sheer force or pure right, but by the one or the other of those two Powers which has Discipline as its Chief of Staff.”

He was implying neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier.  But it did not matter in the least.  For Stella Croyle was not listening.  All this was totally unimportant.  Men always went about and about when they had difficult things to say to women.  Her eyes never left his face and she would know surely enough when those words were rising to his lips which it was necessary that she should mark and understand.  Meanwhile her perplexities and fears grew.

“Of course it can’t be that,” she assured herself again and again, but with a dreadful catch at her heart.  “Oh no, it can’t be that.”

“That,” was the separation which some day or another—­after a long and wondrous period—­both were agreed, must come.  But, consoling herself with the thought that she would be prepared, she had always set the day on so distant an horizon that it had no terrors for her.  Now it suddenly dismayed her, a terror close at hand.  Here on this crowded balcony joyous with lights and gay voices and invaded by all the subtle invitations of a summer night above the water!  Oh no, it was not possible!

Luttrell put his hand to his breast pocket and Stella watched and listened now with all her soul.  More than once during dinner she had seen him touch that pocket in an abstraction.  He drew from it two papers, one the cablegram which he had received from Cairo, the other Hardiman’s reply.  He handed her the first of the two.