“His life is in danger—­an operation?” he questioned.

“Yes.  There is one chance; but they could not give him an anaesthetic, and they would not let me stay with him.  They forced me away—­out here.”  She appeared to listen again.  “That was his voice—­that crying,” she added presently.

“Wouldn’t it be better he should go?  If he recovers there would only be—­”

“Oh yes, to be tried as a spy—­a renegade Englishman!  But he would rather live in spite of that, if it was only for an hour.”

“To love life so much as that—­a spy!” Stafford reflected.

“Not so much love of life as fear of—­” She stopped short.

“To fear—­silence and peace!” he remarked darkly, with a shrug of his shoulders.  Then he added:  “Tell me, if he does not die, and if—­if he is pardoned by any chance, do you mean to live with him again?”

A bitter laugh broke from her.  “How do I know?  What does any woman know what she will do until the situation is before her!  She may mean to do one thing and do the complete opposite.  She may mean to hate, and will end by loving.  She may mean to kiss and will end by killing.  She may kiss and kill too all in one moment, and still not be inconsistent.  She would have the logic of a woman.  How do I know what I would do—­what I will do!”

The door of the hospital opened.  A surgeon came out, and seeing Al’mah, moved towards the two.  Stafford went forward hurriedly, but Al’mah stood like one transfixed.  There was a whispered word, and then Stafford came back to her.

“You will not need to do anything,” he said.

“He is gone—­like that!” she whispered in an awed voice.  “Death, death—­so many die!” She shuddered.

Stafford passed her arm through his, and drew her towards the door of the hospital.

A half-hour later Stafford emerged again from the hospital, his head bent in thought.  He rode slowly back to his battery, unconscious of the stir of life round him, of the shimmering white messages to the besieged town beyond the hills.  He was thinking of the tragedy of the woman he had left tearless and composed beside the bedside of the man who had so vilely used her.  He was reflecting how her life, and his own, and the lives of at least three others, were so tangled together that what twisted the existence of one disturbed all.  In one sense the woman he had just left in the hospital was nothing to him, and yet now she seemed to be the only living person to whom he was drawn.

He remembered the story he had once heard in Vienna of a man and a woman who both had suffered betrayal, who both had no longer a single illusion left, who had no love for each other at all, in whom indeed love was dead—­a mangled murdered thing; and yet who went away to Corfu together, and there at length found a pathway out of despair in the depths of the sea.  Between these two there had never been even the faint shadow of romance or passion; but in the terrible mystery of pain and humiliation, they had drawn together to help each other, through a breach of all social law, in pity of each other.  He apprehended the real meaning of the story when Vienna was alive with it, but he understood far, far better now.