He gave a little sigh of utter content.

“Oh, my dear, how I love you for suggesting such a sweet impossibility,” he said.  “But how you would despise me if I consented.”

She did not answer.

“Wouldn’t you?” he repeated.

She gave a sorrowful semblance of a laugh.

“I suppose I should,” she said.

“And I know you would.  You would contrast me in your mind, whether you wished to or not, with Hermann, with poor Francis, sorely to my disadvantage.”

They sat silent a little, but there was another question Sylvia had to ask for which she had to collect her courage.  At last it came.

“Have they told you yet when you are going?” she said.

“Not for certain.  But—­it will be before many days are passed.  And the question arises—­will you marry me before I go?”

She hid her face on his shoulder.

“I will do what you wish,” she said.

“But I want to know your wish.”

She clung closer to him.

“Michael, I don’t think I could bear to part with you if we were married,” she said.  “It would be worse, I think, than it’s going to be.  But I intend to do exactly what you wish.  You must tell me.  I’m going to obey you before I am your wife as well as after.”

Michael had long debated this in his mind.  It seemed to him that if he came back, as might easily happen, hopelessly crippled, incurably invalid, it would be placing Sylvia in an unfairly difficult position, if she was already his wife.  He might be hideously disfigured; she would be bound to but a wreck of a man; he might be utterly unfit to be her husband, and yet she would be tied to him.  He had already talked the question over with his father, who, with that curious posthumous anxiety to have a further direct heir, had urged that the marriage should take place at once; but with his own feeling on the subject, as well as Sylvia’s, he at once made up his mind.

“I agree with you,” he said.  “We will settle it so, then.”

She smiled at him.

“How dreadfully business-like,” she said, with an attempt at lightness.

“I know.  It’s rather a good thing one has got to be business-like, when—­”

That failed also, and he drew her to him and kissed her.

CHAPTER XVI

Michael was sitting in the kitchen of a French farm-house just outside the village of Laires, some three miles behind the English front.  The kitchen door was open, and on the flagged floor was cast an oblong of primrose-coloured November sunshine, warm and pleasant, so that the bluebottle flies buzzed hopefully about it, settling occasionally on the cracked green door, where they cleaned their wings, and generally furbished themselves up, as if the warmth was that of a spring day that promised summer to follow.  They were there in considerable numbers, for just outside in