“But aren’t you indignant?” she said.  “Doesn’t your blood boil to read of such infamous falsehoods?  You don’t know Germans, but I do, and it is impossible that such things can have happened.”

Michael felt profoundly uncomfortable.  Some of these stories which Sylvia called lies were vouched for, apparently, by respectable testimony.

“Why talk about them?” he said.  “I’m sure we were wise when we settled not to.”

She shook her head.

“Well, I can’t live up to that wisdom,” she said.  “When I think of this war day and night and night and day, how can I prevent talking to you about it?  And those lies!  Germans couldn’t do such things.  It’s a campaign of hate against us, set up by the English Press.”

“I daresay the German Press is no better,” said Michael.

“If that is so, I should be just as indignant about the German Press,” said she.  “But it is only your guess that it is so.”

Suddenly she stopped, and came a couple of steps nearer him.

“Michael, it isn’t possible that you believe those things of us?” she said.

He got up.

“Ah, do leave it alone, Sylvia,” he said.  “I know no more of the truth or falsity of it than you.  I have seen just what you have seen in the papers.”

“You don’t feel the impossibility of it, then?” she asked.

“No, I don’t.  There seems to have been sworn testimony.  War is a cruel thing; I hate it as much as you.  When men are maddened with war, you can’t tell what they would do.  They are not the Germans you know, nor the Germans I know, who did such things—­not the people I saw when I was with Hermann in Baireuth and Munich a year ago.  They are no more the same than a drunken man is the same as that man when he is sober.  They are two different people; drink has made them different.  And war has done the same for Germany.”

He held out his hand to her.  She moved a step back from him.

“Then you think, I suppose, that Hermann may be concerned in those atrocities,” she said.

Michael looked at her in amazement.

“You are talking sheer nonsense, Sylvia,” he said.

“Not at all.  It is a logical inference, just an application of the principle you have stated.”

Michael’s instinct was just to take her in his arms and make the final appeal, saying, “We love each other, that’s all,” but his reason prevented him.  Sylvia had said a monstrous thing in cold blood, when she suggested that he thought Hermann might be concerned in these deeds, and in cold blood, not by appealing to her emotions, must she withdraw that.

“I’m not going to argue about it,” he said.  “I want you to tell me at once that I am right, that it was sheer nonsense, to put no other name to it, when you suggested that I thought that of Hermann.”

“Oh, pray put another name to it,” she said.

“Very well.  It was a wanton falsehood,” said Michael, “and you know it.”