Part 184

"Good-by!"

He turned and walked swiftly into the house. As he passed the stairway, he saw Sister Eila standing there as white as death.

They looked at each other in silence; she laid one hand on the banisters as though to steady herself. With the other she held out to him a flower.

When he had gone with his flower, and when the whir of his motor car had died away in that silent house, she turned to ascend the stairs again, stumbled, dropped by the rail, and lay there huddled in a heap, both hands pressed desperately over her quivering face.

Then in the room above, the sick man groaned; and she straightened up and rose as though a trumpet had sounded. And slowly, steadily, she mounted her Calvary, drying her eyes naively and like a little girl who has been hurt and whose grief seems hopeless, inconsolable, and never ending.

Slowly, side by side, his arm once more in her possession, Warner and Philippa returned to the Chateau.

When they reached the terrace, the stars overhead had become magnificent; millions and millions of them sparkled up there, arching the dark earth with necklaces of light.

He turned and gazed out over the panorama of the night. Far in the east the silver pencil of a searchlight swept the heavens.

Into the mysterious east he stared in silence, thinking of Wildresse.

The Orient had hatched out Wildresse; Biribi had caught him; Biribi had utterly extinguished his race at last.

The mysterious irony of it--the death of this man's only son--the fate that had delivered the father into the crime-blotched hands of that terrible battalion--the hazard of Asticot's discovery in the safe--the sudden, dramatic unmasking of Cassilis--could these things be happening in this year of 1914?

Stranger things than these were happening, and he knew it.

Westward the spray of a grey sea dripped from the muzzles of a thousand guns.

Eastward the coldly logical strategy of a great commander was developing, and the first fierce drive at Alsace-Lorraine was being launched.

From farther eastward still the two allies, listening, caught already the low growling of the Russian bear.

Germany, poised high above the glare of battle, waiting to snatch up, one by one, heroic and dying nations to her bosom--Germany clutching the dripping sword of conquest, heard also the rumbling of the Asiatic monster behind the Caucasus.

She turned her armed head and stared over her mailed shoulder toward the east, haughty, incredulous, magnificently barbaric--the last of the Valkyries left amid the dying gods of old, standing there alone, glittering, motionless amid the hellish conflagration of the Goetterdaemmerung.

Warner looked up at the stars.

The glimmering writing on Heaven's wall was plain to read.

Plainer, it seemed, than his own heart, which had grown heavy as he stood there beside the woman to whom it was now too late to speak.

For he should have spoken before, long ago, almost in the beginning. Because he had always loved her. He had known it for days, now; and yet with that blind delay and distrust of self to which some men are fated, he had waited too long to ask of her what his heart had so long, so blindly desired.

Now it was too late: He should have spoken before.

He should have spoken when she was lonely, friendless, nameless.

Now it was too late.

He turned toward the house, but she did not move, they came face to face under the high stars.

"Can't you--love me?" she faltered.

"Philippa!----"

She flung both arms around his neck.