“But we could have talked them over.”
“If you’d waited.”
“I should have waited forever if I’d known.”
“Or if,” she went on, with the same serenity, “you hadn’t disappeared next day without leaving an address. I tried to find you—as well as I could, that is—without seeming to hunt you down.”
I explained that when I left New York on that last Monday in June, 1914, I had not expected to be gone for more than a few weeks—just the time to recover from the first effects of the blow I thought her scorn had dealt to me.
“It was curious, though,” I went on, “that that name, Gavrilo Prinzip, should have hammered itself in on my brain. I recall it now as about the only thing I could think of. I didn’t know what it meant, and I was far from supposing it the touchstone of human destinies that it afterward proved to be; but in some unreasoning way it held me. It was like the meaningless catch of a tune with which you can’t go on, till all at once you see it finishes in—”
“In a trumpet-call. Yes, I know. You had to follow it. So had I. I don’t think there’s much more than that to be said.”
The blue-gray streak was again on the starboard side, but comfortingly far astern. Though we were still within her range, we were getting the benefit of distance. At the same time some one called our attention to a blotch of black smoke, far down on the eastern horizon. A destroyer was coming to our aid.
I went back to the point we had partially forsaken.
“How long did you expect me to wait that afternoon?”