"And yet it isn't any longer just duty. You want to go!" she cried. "I saw that yesterday when we talked about the Lusitania."
"Yes," he said grimly, "I want to go."
"Well, so do lots of my countrymen." And Napier couldn't have told whether dismay or pride was dominant in the new note. His hand slipped down her arm and found her fingers. Napier's valet, Day, came running out of the dock-gates. He looked distractedly across the wide, open space before the slips.
"Yes!" Napier hailed him. "I'll be there!" He gripped her hand hard before he let it go. "I'll have to run for it. Good-by." On an impulse, whether mere instinct to cover his emotion or some obscurer working of the mind behind his wretchedness, he caught Julian's cable out of her hold. He held the paper in front of his misty eyes as he hurried toward the dock entrance. The hour the message had been sent from London struck him now for the first time. He halted suddenly. In a voice harsh with the effort to keep it steady he called back: "Did Greta know that you meant to go with me?"
"Yes," came the panting answer as the girl ran forward a few steps. "I told her before I saw you that I couldn't bear it over here any longer. And now you—you are leaving me!" She stopped.
"You'll lose the boat, sir!" Day called out.
Napier's last vision of Nan Ellis showed the girl still standing there looking after him and sobbing openly in the street.
This cable, he knew now was no reply to Nan's. It was the reply to some message sent hours earlier by Greta von Schwarzenberg.