"'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.
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