Benton nodded and a defiant glint came to his pupils.

“I come to serve notice,” he announced briefly, “of something I mean to do.”

Van took the pipe from his mouth and regarded it with concentrated attention, while his friend went on in carefully gauged voice.

“I am here,” he explained, “as a guest in your house.  I mean to make war on certain plans and arrangements which presumably have your sympathy and support—­and I mean to make the hardest war I know.”  He paused, but as Van gave no indication of cutting in, he went on in aggressive announcement.  “What I mean to do is my business—­mine and a girl’s—­but since she is your kinswoman and this is your place, it wouldn’t be quite fair to begin without warning.”

For a time Bristow’s attitude remained that of deep and silent reflection.  Finally he knocked the ashes from his pipe and came over until he stood directly confronting Benton.

“So she has told you?” was his brief question at last.

The other nodded.

The master of “Idle Times” paced thoughtfully up and down the room.  When at length he stopped it was to clap his hand on his class-mate’s shoulder.

“George,” he said, with a voice hardened to edit down the note of sympathy that threatened it, “you seem to start out with the assumption that I am against you.  Get that out of your head.  Cara has hungered for freedom.  We’ve felt that she had the right to, at least, her little intervals of recess.  It happened that she could have them here.  Here she could be Miss Carstow—­and cease to be Cara of Maritzburg.  I am sorry if you—­and she—­must pay for these vacations with your happiness.  I see now that people who are sentenced to imprisonment, should not play with liberty.”

“She is not going to play with liberty,” declared Benton categorically.  “She is going to have it.  She is going to have for the rest of her life just what she wants.”  He lifted his hand in protest against anticipated interruption.  “I know that you have got to line up with your royal relatives.  I know the utter impossibility of what I want—­but I’m going to win.  If you regard me as a burglar, you may turn me out, but you can’t stop me.”

“I sha’n’t turn you out,” mused Van quietly.  “I wish you could win.  But you are not merely fighting people.  You are fighting an idea.  It is only for an idea that men and women martyr themselves.  With Cara this idea has become morbid—­an obsession.  She has inherited it together with an abnormally developed courage, and her conception of courage is to face what she most hates and fears.”

“But if I can show her that it is a mistaken courage—­that instead of loyalty it is desertion?” The man spoke with quick eagerness.

Van shook his head, and his eyes clouded with the gravity of sympathy for a futile resolve.

“That you can’t do.  I am an American myself.  I’m not policing thrones.  To me it seems a monstrous thing that a girl superbly American in everything but the accident of birth should have no chance—­no opportunity to escape life-imprisonment.  It doesn’t altogether compensate that the prison happens to be a palace.”