He raised his eyebrows.
“With the exception of one half-hour,” he replied unexpectedly, “I am wholly at your service.”
“I am exacting,” she declared. “I demand that half-hour also.”
“I am afraid that I could not allow anything to interfere with one brief call which I must pay.”
“In Downing Street?”
“Precisely!”
“You go to visit your friend at the Foreign Office?”
“Immediately I have called at my rooms.”
She looked away from him out of the window. Beneath her veil her eyes were a little misty. She saw nothing of the trimly partitioned fields, the rolling pastoral country. Before her vision tragedies seemed to pass,—the blood-stained paraphernalia of the battlefield, the empty, stricken homes, the sobbing women in black, striving to comfort their children whilst their own hearts were breaking. When she turned away from the window, her face was hardened. Once more she found herself almost hating the man who was her companion. Whatever might come afterwards, at that moment she had the sensations of a murderess.
“You may know when you sleep to-night,” she exclaimed, “that you will be the blood-guiltiest man in the world!”