“You look ever so well, Michael,” she said, “in spite of your wound.  You’re so brown and lean and strong.  And oh, how I have wanted you!  I never knew how much till you went away.”

Looking at her, feeling her arms round him, Michael felt that what he had to say was beyond the power of his lips to utter.  And yet, here in her presence, the absolute necessity of telling her climbed like some peak into the ample sunrise far above the darkness and the mists that hung low about it.

“And what lots you must have to tell me,” she said.  “I want to hear all—­all.”

Suddenly Michael put up his left hand and took away from his neck the arm that encircled it.  But he did not let go of it.  He held it in his hand.

“I have to tell you one thing at once,” he said.  She looked at him, and the smile that burned in her eyes was extinguished.  From his gesture, from his tone, she knew that he spoke of something as serious as their love.

“What is it?” she said.  “Tell me, then.”

He did not falter, but looked her full in the face.  There was no breaking it to her, or letting her go through the gathering suspense of guessing.

“It concerns Hermann,” he said.  “It concerns Hermann and me.  The last morning that I was in the trenches, there was an attack at dawn from the German lines.  They tried to rush our trench in the dark.  Hermann led them.  He got right up to the trench.  And I shot him.  I did not know, thank God!”

Suddenly Michael could not bear to look at her any more.  He put his arm on the table by him and, leaning his head on it, covering his eyes he went on.  But his voice, up till now quite steady, faltered and failed, as the sobs gathered in his throat.

“He fell across the parapet close to me,” he said. . . .  “I lifted him somehow into our trench. . . .  I was wounded, then. . . .  He lay at the bottom of the trench, Sylvia. . . .  And I would to God it had been I who lay there. . . .  Because I loved him. . . .  Just at the end he opened his eyes, and saw me, and knew me.  And he said—­oh, Sylvia, Sylvia!—­he said ‘Lieber Gott, Michael.  Good morning, old boy.’  And then he died. . . .  I have told you.”

And at that Michael broke down utterly and completely for the first time since the morning of which he spoke, and sobbed his heart out, while, unseen to him, Sylvia sat with hands clasped together and stretched towards him.  Just for a little she let him weep his fill, but her yearning for him would not be withstood.  She knew why he had told her, her whole heart spoke of the hugeness of it.

Then once more she laid her arm on his neck.

“Michael, my heart!” she said.