"Who is Mr. Wilkins?"
"Oh, Mr. Wilkins is a splendid person who is organizing stop-the-war meetings."
"Well," said Napier, shortly, "that's a good way to give Mr. Wilkins a taste of it."
"You mean a taste of war?" She dropped her hand. "Oh, I wish you wouldn't say things like that!"
"How I am making her hate me!" he said to himself. "Well, since she won't love me, what does it matter?"
But it did matter. It mattered to the very core of him. It mattered to the waking and the sleeping. It mattered for all of life—he knew that now. It would add a bitterness to the bitterness of death. To die never having had this—
She sat with hands lying slack in her lap. "I think I'd like to go home," she said. "I don't like England as much as I did."
"Why is that?"
She looked at him oddly and then away. After another little silence, "Well, for one thing, I think it's abominable the way they are talking and writing about the men who didn't approve of the war and were brave enough to say so, and say it publicly." She turned her eyes from the curling, crisping foam as if to plead for some little sympathy for these views. There was no sign on Napier's face. She thrust her iron-pointed stick into the sand. "What they've given up, some of those men, for the sake of—oh, it's the most splendid thing I ever came near to! I love those men."
"All of them?" Napier asked drily.