"I can't pretend that that word wasn't the only one to express my feelings for him on his wedding day," Eagle admitted. "Not because he'd taken Diana from me, though. That's the strange part! I found it out while she was being married to Vandyke, and it was the thing I'd wanted to find out. In the relief, I ought to have forgiven him everything. But I didn't forgive. The ruin he'd wrought on my career overtopped everything else in my mind even at that minute. If some great power could have put me in Vandyke's place at the altar, and given Diana to me instead of to him, I would not have taken her—not even with her love. It seemed to me that what she would call her love wasn't worth the name of love, after—what had passed. It was only the memory of all I'd felt for her which hurt just then, so far as she was concerned. But for him—God, Peggy! to see him at the height of his hopes and ambitions made me mad to choke his life out! It does me good to confess this to you now, for you're the only one on earth to whom I'd speak."
"Yet, when you went out of church, you saved him from danger of death!" I said thoughtfully.
"That's just one of life's little ironies, isn't it?" Eagle laughed a low and bitter laugh. "It occurred to me afterward that I'd spoilt a good melodramatic plot. Hero secretly goes to church to see the woman who jilted him marry the villain to whom he owes his ruin. Villain is killed before his eyes on the way to the wedding reception. Big climax!"
"I think it was more dramatic," said I, "for the hero to save the villain's life."
"Too conventional. Obvious sort of thing!" sneered Eagle. "But I am conventional and obvious, I suppose. I did what I did simply because I couldn't help it, and I'd probably do it all over again. I'd have regretted it afterward, perhaps, if Di—if Lady Diana hadn't been in danger, too. I bear her no grudge."
"You're very noble," I said.
"It's not nobility. It's more like callousness. I freed myself from Lady Diana on her wedding day, or found that I was free. But if you could see into my soul when I think of Vandyke, you wouldn't call me 'noble.' I honestly pray for the day when I can remember him with indifference, and when I can say of what he did to me that good is born of evil. That's what I'm working for. But the time hasn't come yet. Maybe it will if I can manage to make myself of real use in this war. I've done nothing yet except a little scouting."
"Liége thinks differently, and so will all the world when it knows."
"I'm not working to reinstate myself in the world's eyes, but in my own—and most of all to help Belgium. There are things one does just for the thing itself. I have a fellow-feeling with a country suffering unjustly. After what I've gone through myself, I seem to owe her allegiance, as to a friend who understands. The moment this war cloud began to gather, I thought it would burst over Belgium, and I crossed the frontier from France with the Eagle, to offer my services. I'm glad now I failed in the hope that brought me over from America to England. I wanted to join Shackleton's Polar expedition, but he had no need of me."
"So that was why you came to England?"