way gropingly, confused by his consciousness of her unuttered doubts.
"Why I have to tell you this I can hardly say. It's not for his sake. It's certainly not for mine. It's for yours, I fancy. Yes, I'm sure. By doing him justice I shall be able to help you, though I have no reason for supposing that you stand in need of help. It's to do him justice that he's been urging me. Yet why should he have selected me to be his spokesman? I wasn't his friend. I never met him till I reached the Front; out there I really never knew him. No one did. He was like a sleep-walker—a very silent man. You'll be wondering why, if this was the case, I should be so impertinent as to mention his name to you—to you of all persons, who can claim to have known him infinitely more intimately than any one else. And you'll be wondering why, after two months of procrastinating, I motored through the night from London to force my way into your privacy, without forewarning or introduction. If I'm going to be honest, I must run the risk of appearing absurd. I could resist him no longer. He coerced me with ill-luck. Ever since I entered your sister's house and discovered who you were, he's been urging——"
"Who I was!" Her head turned slowly. It was her first intense display of interest.
"I mean your relation to him—that it was you who were his wife. At the Front I didn't know that he was Lord Dawn; he'd blotted out his identity. He was merely gun-fodder like the rest of us—something to be sent over the top to be smashed and then to be
left to sink into the mud or else hurried back to be patched up in hospital. He was a company-commander in my battalion. I knew nothing of his past. My acquaintance with him began and ended in the trenches. I don't know much now—only what Maisie's told me." He had been speaking with growing earnestness. Suddenly he flashed into indignant vehemence. "What Maisie's told me! It's false of the man as he was out there. He wants you to believe that. Out there he was different. He may have been paltry and base once; but he was reborn into a new nobility. He was white all through. He was overpoweringly heroic. From the humblest Tommy we all adored him—adored him for the example he set us. He was only cheerful when there was dying to be done—out at rest and in quiet sectors he was gloomy. The men loved him for that; it struck them as humorous. And yet he was utterly indifferent to their love. He'd got beyond caring for what anybody thought of him. He was too absorbed in establishing reasons for thinking well of himself. I learnt things about him—one does in the presence of physical torture. I learnt secrets about the fineness of his spirit which, I believe, he never allowed you to suspect. Probably he never suspected them himself until the ordeal of terror had sifted the gold from the dross. It was the dross that Maisie remembered. But we, who were his comrades in khaki, saw nothing but the gold—his untiring ability to share. You weren't there; nevertheless, that's what I've got to help you to understand. I've got to make you see the new Lord Dawn who was born out there.
It was last night, after Pollock returned, that I saw my duty clearly. It came on me in a flash that, if a man who had been counted dead could come back, it was not impossible that this pleading from beyond the grave, which I'd tried to thwart and ridicule——"
He broke off abruptly. It was the wideness of her eyes that warned him. He was conscious that she, too, was feeling that invisible pressure. She was expecting to see something. He followed the direction of her eyes, glancing behind him into the hollow dimness of the room, where the solitary lamp was burning and the vanished lords of Dawn gazed stonily down from their canvases. In that moment he was aware that he had been stating facts as he had never owned them to himself. It was as though his lips had been used——
"Things that he didn't allow me to suspect!" She sighed shudderingly. "He allowed me to suspect so much. But tell me. What were these things? Since they're the reasons for your visit, they must be important."
"They're only part of the reasons."
"There are others?"