war machines, you know, were only one sort of the endless war contrivances that had been invented and had fallen into abeyance during the long peace.  There were all sorts of these things that people were routing out and furbishing up; infernal things, silly things; things that had never been tried; big engines, terrible explosives, great guns.  You know the silly way of these ingenious sort of men who make these things; they turn ’em out as beavers build dams, and with no more sense of the rivers they’re going to divert and the lands they’re going to flood!

“As we went down the winding stepway to our hotel again, in the twilight, I foresaw it all:  I saw how clearly and inevitably things were driving for war in Evesham’s silly, violent hands, and I had some inkling of what war was bound to be under these new conditions.  And even then, though I knew it was drawing near the limit of my opportunity, I could find no will to go back.”

He sighed.

“That was my last chance.

“We didn’t go into the city until the sky was full of stars, so we walked out upon the high terrace, to and fro, and—­she counselled me to go back.

“‘My dearest,’ she said, and her sweet face looked up to me, ’this is Death.  This life you lead is Death.  Go back to them, go back to your duty—­’

“She began to weep, saying, between her sobs, and clinging to my arm as she said it, ‘Go back—­Go back.’

“Then suddenly she fell mute, and, glancing down at her face, I read in an instant the thing she had thought to do.  It was one of those moments when one sees.

“‘No!’ I said.

“‘No?’ she asked, in surprise and I think a little fearful at the answer to her thought.

“‘Nothing,’ I said, ’shall send me back.  Nothing!  I have chosen.  Love, I have chosen, and the world must go.  Whatever happens I will live this life—­I will live for you!  It—­nothing shall turn me aside; nothing, my dear one.  Even if you died—­even if you died—­’

“‘Yes?’ she murmured, softly.

“‘Then—­I also would die.’

“And before she could speak again I began to talk, talking eloquently—­as I could do in that life—­talking to exalt love, to make the life we were living seem heroic and glorious; and the thing I was deserting something hard and enormously ignoble that it was a fine thing to set aside.  I bent all my mind to throw that glamour upon it, seeking not only to convert her but myself to that.  We talked, and she clung to me, torn too between all that she deemed noble and all that she knew was sweet.  And at last I did make it heroic, made all the thickening disaster of the world only a sort of glorious setting to our unparalleled love, and we two poor foolish souls strutted there at last, clad in that splendid delusion, drunken rather with that glorious delusion, under the still stars.

“And so my moment passed.

“It was my last chance.  Even as we went to and fro there, the leaders of the south and east were gathering their resolve, and the hot answer that shattered Evesham’s bluffing for ever, took shape and waited.  And, all over Asia, and the ocean, and the South, the air and the wires were throbbing with their warnings to prepare—­prepare.