“On the grey mare.  I did not know that you were here, and—­”

“If you had known I was here, you would not have come?” she asked with a querulous ring to her voice.

“No, I should not have come if I had known, unless people in the camp were aware that I knew.  Then I should have felt it necessary to come.”

“Why?” She knew; but she wanted him to say.

“That the army should not talk and wonder.  If you were here, it is obvious that I should visit you.”

“The army might as well wonder first as last,” she rejoined.  “That must come.”

“I don’t know anything that must come in this world,” he replied.  “We don’t control ourselves, and must lies in the inner Mystery where we cannot enter.  I had only to deal with the present.  I could not come to the General and go again, knowing that you were here, without seeing you.  We ought to do our work here without unnecessary cross-firing from our friends.  There’s enough of that from our foes.”

“What right had you to enter my room?” she rejoined stubbornly.

“I am not in your room.  Something—­call it anything you like—­made us meet on this neutral ground.”

“You might have waited till morning,” she replied perversely.

“In the morning I shall be far from here.  Before daybreak I shall be fighting.  War waits for no one—­not even for you,” he added, with more sarcasm than he intended.

Her feelings were becoming chaos again.  He was going into battle.  Bygone memories wakened, and the first days of their lives together came rushing upon her; but her old wild spirit was up in arms too against the irony of his last words, “Not even for you.”  Added to this was the rushing remembrance that South Africa had been the medium of all her trouble.  If Rudyard had not gone to South Africa, that one five months a year and more ago, when she was left alone, restless, craving for amusement and excitement and—­she was going to say romance, but there was no romance in those sordid hours of pleasure-making, when she plucked the fruit as it lay to her hand—­ah, if only Rudyard had not gone to South Africa then!  That five months held no romance.  She had never known but one romance, and it was over and done.  The floods had washed it away.

“You are right.  War does not wait even for me,” she exclaimed.  “It came to meet me, to destroy me, when I was not armed.  It came in the night as you have come, and found me helpless as I am now.”

Suddenly she clasped her hands and wrung them, then threw them above her head in a gesture of despair.  “Why didn’t God or Destiny, or whatever it is, stop you from coming here!  There is nothing between us worth keeping, and there can never be.  There is a black sea between us.  I never want to see you any more.”