"Yes." Her fingers exercised the faintest pressure on his shoulder. "Your true love, your one enduring love, is the guns. All other loves come and go. To-morrow, if not, next day, in this big, throbbing world, with your future assured, as you lived other great moments you would look back on this moment as another part that you had acted—and so beautifully acted."
"Act! Act!" he repeated, like one who is coming to grip with facts.
For a period he stared at the ground before he reached for the hand on his shoulder, which he pressed in both of his, looking soberly into her eyes. He smiled; smiled apparently at a memory, let her hand drop, and raised his own hands, palms out, in a gesture of good-humored comprehension.
"You know me!" he exclaimed. "But I did it well, didn't I?" he asked, after a pause.
"Beautifully. I repeat, it was convincingly real," she replied, laughing in relief.
"If I hadn't, it would have been most disappointing after all my rehearsals," he went on. "Yes, you know me! Why, I might have been wanting to break the engagement in a week because I was beginning other rehearsals!" He laughed, too, as if relishing the prospect. "Yes, I act—act always, except with the guns. They alone are real!" he burst out in joyous fury. "We are going on, I and my guns, on to the best yet—on in the pursuit! Nothing can stop us! We shall hit the Grays so fast and hard that they can never get their machine in order again. God bless you! Everything that is fine in me will always think finely of you! You and Lanny—two fixed stars for me!"
"Truly!" She was radiant. "Truly?" she asked wistfully.
"Yes, yes—a yes as real as the guns!"
"Then it helps! Oh, how it helps!" she murmured almost inaudibly.
"Good-by! God bless you!" he cried as he started to go, adding over his shoulder merrily: "I'll send you a picture post-card from the Grays' capital of my guns parked in the palace square."