his thoughts turned to Francis himself again, who, through all his boyhood and early manhood, had been to him a sort of ideal and inspiration.  How he had loved and admired him, yet never with a touch of jealousy!  And Francis, whose letter lay open by him on the table, lay dead on the battlefields of France.  There was the envelope, with the red square mark of the censor upon it, and the sheet with its gay scrawl in pencil, asking for proper cigarettes.  And, with a pang of remorse, all the more vivid because it concerned so trivial a thing, Michael recollected that he had not sent them.  He had meant to do so yesterday afternoon but something had put it out of his head.  Never again would Francis ask him to send out cigarettes.  Michael laid his head on his arms, so that his face was close to that pencilled note, and the relief of tears came to him.

Soon he raised himself again, not ashamed of his sorrow, but somehow ashamed of the black hate that before had filled him.  That was gone for the present, anyhow, and Michael was glad to find it vanished.  Instead there was an aching pity, not for Francis alone nor for himself, but for all those concerned in this hideous business.  A hundred and a thousand homes, thrown suddenly to-day into mourning, were there:  no doubt there were houses in that Bavarian village in the pine woods above which he and Hermann had spent the day when there was no opera at Baireuth where a son or a brother or a father were mourned, and in the kinship of sorrow he found himself at peace with all who had suffered loss, with all who were living through days of deadly suspense.  There was nothing effeminate or sentimental about it; he had never been manlier than in this moment when he claimed his right to be one with them.  It was right to pause like this, with his hand clasped in the hands of friends and foes alike.  But without disowning that, he knew that Francis’s death, which had brought that home to him, had made him eager also for his own turn to come, when he would go out to help in the grim work that lay in front of him.  He was perfectly ready to die if necessary, and if not, to kill as many Germans as possible.  And somehow the two aspects of it all, the pity and the desire to kill, existed side by side, neither overlapping nor contradicting one another.

His servant came into the room with a pencilled note, which he opened.  It was from Sylvia.

“Oh, Michael, I have just called and am waiting to know if you will see me.  I have seen the news, and I want to tell you how sorry I am.  But if you don’t care to see me I know you will say so, won’t you?”

Though an hour before he had turned back on his way to go to Sylvia, he did not hesitate now.

“Yes, ask Miss Falbe to come up,” he said.

She came up immediately, and once again as they met, the world and the war stood apart from them.

“I did not expect you to come, Michael,” she said, “when I saw the news.  I did not mean to come here myself.  But—­but I had to.  I had just to find out whether you wouldn’t see me, and let me tell you how sorry I am.”