“Ah, my dear,” she said, “I am glad you have come.  I have got the horrors.  You saw the latest news?  Yes?  And have you heard again from Hermann?  No, I have not had a word.”

He kissed her and sat down.

“No, I have not heard either,” he said.  “I expect he is right.  Letters have been stopped.”

“And what do you think will be the result of Belgium’s appeal?” she asked.

“Who can tell?  The Prime Minister is going to make a statement on Monday.  There have been Cabinet meetings going on all day.”

She looked at him in silence.

“And what do you think?” she asked.

Quite suddenly, at her question, Michael found himself facing it, even as, when the final catastrophe was more remote, he had faced it with Falbe.  All this week he knew he had been looking away from it, telling himself that it was incredible.  Now he discovered that the one thing he dreaded more than that England should go to war, was that she should not.  The consciousness of national honour, the thing which, with religion, Englishmen are most shy of speaking about, suddenly asserted itself, and he found on the moment that it was bigger than anything else in the world.

“I think we shall go to war,” he said.  “I don’t see personally how we can exist any more as a nation if we don’t.  We—­we shall be damned if we don’t, damned for ever and ever.  It’s moral extinction not to.”

She kindled at that.

“Yes, I know,” she said, “that’s what I have been telling myself; but, oh, Mike, there’s some dreadful cowardly part of me that won’t listen when I think of Hermann, and . . .”

She broke off a moment.

“Michael,” she said, “what will you do, if there is war?”

He took up her hand that lay on the arm of his chair.

“My darling, how can you ask?” he said.  “Of course I shall go back to the army.”

For one moment she gave way.

“No, no,” she said.  “You mustn’t do that.”

And then suddenly she stopped.

“My dear, I ask your pardon,” she said.  “Of course you will.  I know that really.  It’s only this stupid cowardly part of me that—­that interrupted.  I am ashamed of it.  I’m not as bad as that all through.  I don’t make excuses for myself, but, ah, Mike, when I think of what Germany is to me, and what Hermann is, and when I think what England is to me, and what you are!  It shan’t appear again, or if it does, you will make allowance, won’t you?  At least I can agree with you utterly, utterly.  It’s the flesh that’s weak, or, rather, that is so strong.  But I’ve got it under.”

She sat there in silence a little, mopping her eyes.

“How I hate girls who cry!” she said.  “It is so dreadfully feeble!  Look, Mike, there are some roses on that tree from which I plucked the one you didn’t think much of.  Do you remember?  You crushed it up in my hand and made it bleed.”