They stood with hands clasped.

“But if you hadn’t come, Michael,” she said, “I should have understood.”

And then the roar and the horror began again.  Her words were the simplest, the most directly spoken to him, yet could not but evoke the spectres that for the moment had vanished.  She had meant to let her love for him speak; it had spoken, and instantly through the momentary sunlight of it, there loomed the fierce and enormous shadow.  It could not be banished from their most secret hearts; even when the doors were shut and they were alone together thus, it made its entrance, ghost-like, terrible, and all love’s bolts and bars could not keep it out.  Here was the tragedy of it, that they could not stand embraced with clasped hands and look at it together and so rob it of its terrors, for, at the sight of it, their hands were loosened from each other’s, and in its presence they were forced to stand apart.  In his heart, as surely as he knew her love, Michael knew that this great shadow under which England lay was shot with sunlight for Sylvia, that the anxiety, the awful suspense that made his fingers cold as he opened the daily papers, brought into it to her an echo of victorious music that beat to the tramp of advancing feet that marched ever forward leaving the glittering Rhine leagues upon leagues in their rear.  The Bavarian corps in which Hermann served was known to be somewhere on the Western front, for the Emperor had addressed them ten days before on their departure from Munich, and Sylvia and Michael were both aware of that.  But they who loved Hermann best could not speak of it to each other, and the knowledge of it had to be hidden in silence, as if it had been some guilty secret in which they were the terrified accomplices, instead of its being a bond of love which bound them both to Hermann.

In addition to the national anxiety, there was the suspense of those whose sons and husbands and fathers were in the fighting line.  Columns of casualty lists were published, and each name appearing there was a sword that pierced a home.  One such list, published early in September, was seen by Michael as he drove down on Sunday morning to spend the rest of the day with Sylvia, and the first name that he read there was that of Francis.  For a moment, as he remembered afterwards, the print had danced before his eyes, as if seen through the quiver of hot air.  Then it settled down and he saw it clearly.

He turned and drove back to his rooms in Half Moon Street, feeling that strange craving for loneliness that shuns any companionship.  He must, for a little, sit alone with the fact, face it, adjust himself to it.  Till that moment when the dancing print grew still again he had not, in all the anxiety and suspense of those days, thought of Francis’s death as a possibility even.  He had heard from him only two mornings before, in a letter thoroughly characteristic that saw, as Francis always saw, the