The Girl Philippa
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.