She replied ruefully, ‘They have forsaken me. Perhaps’—she pointed lightly to her cheeks—‘you have remarked that other adornments have turned traitors too. Sooner or later I must tell you: why not now? My physicians’—she pronounced the words with a mock pomposity, and punctuated them with a slight grimace—‘give me a year, or not so long perhaps, for the pomps and vanities of this delightfully wicked world. And so, you see, out of pure consideration, the pomps and vanities are withdrawing gradually in preparation for their final exit.’

She relinquished the accent of raillery, and began hurriedly and anxiously to caress his detaining hand. He seized her wrists and bent an incredulous glance upon her.

‘It is some wretched jest. I do not believe you serious.’

‘Just now I am as serious as I shall ever be.’

‘You do not mean….’ He could not achieve the obvious question, and stood holding the small fingers closely—stammering—silenced.

‘Yes, truly, I have got marching orders, with a respite. There is a year for speech, for folly, for wisdom—if it were not so dull—and a year, my dear, for love.’

‘My G—!’ he cried. ‘You have stunned me, Ella. You are here; I can see and hear you; but I can’t manage to understand. It is like a nightmare. It isn’t true?’

She released and laid her hands upon his arm, and checking his outburst with the flicker of a smile, protested,—‘You do not meet the enemy like a soldier.’

‘I have not your nerve’, he answered. ‘Surely,’ he ventured, ‘some other man will give you hope or time.’

She shook her head, and quoted lightly,—“‘If we die today, if we die tomorrow, there is little to choose. No man may speak when once the Fates have spoken.”’

Her eyes were challenging his to courage. ‘You loved your life far more than most of us’, he said, immediately wishing the words back.

‘I adored—I adore it. You link me with the past tense too readily. We will have no future nor subjunctive moods, only the present and imperative. Je t’aime—aime-toi, par example.’

‘Ella’, he cried, ‘for God’s sake be serious. I don’t know how long you have known what you have told me. Remember it is new to me.’

‘It is passably new to me.’ She flashed a swift rebuke towards him from the brave blue eyes. ‘Do you wish me to play the coward?’

‘You could not’, he asserted brokenly. ‘You are a good soldier spoiled.’

‘The finest, if the clumsiest, compliment you have ever paid me.’

‘It is not that’, he said almost roughly. ‘You shame me heart and soul; I feel like a deserter.’

‘They are cut after another pattern’, she observed, with sweet decision. ‘We were neither of us made to turn our backs upon what lies before us or pull long faces at a foe. Through this long year—I will confess to a weary year—it never occurred to me as a reality that you would fail. I thought you might—I did not fear you would; but if you had, I should have faced it, and it would have been harder to face than death.’