“And they will?”

“Yes, I should think that is inevitable.  And you know there’s something big about it.  I’m not warlike, you know, but I could not fail to be a soldier under these new conditions, any more than I could continue being a soldier when all it meant was to be ornamental.  Hermann in bursts of pride and patriotism used to call us toy-soldiers.  But he’s wrong now; we’re not going to be toy-soldiers any more.”

She did not answer him, but he felt her hand press close in the palm of his.

“I can’t tell you how I dreaded we shouldn’t go to war,” he said.  “That has been a nightmare, if you like.  It would have been the end of us if we had stood aside and seen Germany violate a solemn treaty.”

Even with Michael close to her, the call of her blood made itself audible to Sylvia.  Instinctively she withdrew her hand from his.

“Ah, you don’t understand Germany at all,” she said.  “Hermann always felt that too.  He told me he felt he was talking gibberish to you when he spoke of it.  It is clearly life and death to Germany to move against France as quickly as possible.”

“But there’s a direct frontier between the two,” said he.

“No doubt, but an impossible one.”

Michael frowned, drawing his big eyebrows together.

“But nothing can justify the violation of a national oath,” he said.  “That’s the basis of civilisation, a thing like that.”

“But if it’s a necessity?  If a nation’s existence depends on it?” she asked.  “Oh, Michael, I don’t know!  I don’t know!  For a little I am entirely English, and then something calls to me from beyond the Rhine!  There’s the hopelessness of it for me and such as me.  You are English; there’s no question about it for you.  But for us!  I love England:  I needn’t tell you that.  But can one ever forget the land of one’s birth?  Can I help feeling the necessity Germany is under?  I can’t believe that she has wantonly provoked war with you.”

“But consider—­” said he.

She got up suddenly.

“I can’t argue about it,” she said.  “I am English and I am German.  You must make the best of me as I am.  But do be sorry for me, and never, never forget that I love you entirely.  That’s the root fact between us.  I can’t go deeper than that, because that reaches to the very bottom of my soul.  Shall we leave it so, Michael, and not ever talk of it again?  Wouldn’t that be best?”

There was no question of choice for Michael in accepting that appeal.  He knew with the inmost fibre of his being that, Sylvia being Sylvia, nothing that she could say or do or feel could possibly part him from her.  When he looked at it directly and simply like that, there was nothing that could blur the verity of it.  But the truth of what she said, the reality of that call of the blood, seemed to cast a shadow over it.  He knew beyond all other knowledge that it was there:  only it looked out at him with a shadow, faint, but unmistakable, fallen across it.  But the sense of that made him the more eagerly accept her suggestion.