Meg longed to confide her secret to him, but something held her back; something said to her that he was not meant to know it, that if he knew he might be tempted to do still more foolhardy deeds, he would feel compelled to put her mystical message to the test. She remained silent; her mind was working too quickly for speech. She had forgotten that Michael wanted her answer. Her heart had given it so willingly that words were scarcely needed, but he pressed her for her consent. There are some words which lovers like to hear spoken by beautiful lips.
"You are the mistress of my happiness," he urged. "And if our happiness in this world is to be condensed into twelve days, surely it would be worth while seizing it and being thankful for it? In this world of agony and death, twelve days of life at its fullest is of more account than a long lifetime of unrecognized benefits and indefinite happiness."
Meg agreed that the war had taught people to be thankful for what seemed to her pitifully small mercies; people married for ten days or for a fortnight at the longest, knowing that for that little time of forgetfulness their husbands were among the quick; at the end of it they might be among the dead.
"Then, if I can get a special licence to-morrow, will you marry me the day after? If I may go back to the Front as your husband, Meg, I think I can win the war. My life will be more charmed than ever." He laughed gaily. "What will the boys say? I'm the only one in the trench who doesn't write to about six girls every day, telling each one that she is the only girl he loves."
Margaret's answer was in her laugh, which was all love, and in the lips she held up to meet Michael's kiss. "And it's proud I'll be to be Mrs. Amory!" she said. "And ye can tell the boys that, if you like." She broke off suddenly from her mock Irish tones, and said more gravely, "Isn't it wonderful? Only an hour ago I was alone in London, so lonely that the very flowers hurt me! I hated the spring in the year—it laughed at my dull room and humdrum existence. And now——"
"And now," he said, "you are going to be a soldier's wife, you are going to marry a verminous Tommy in two days' time, you darling!"
Meg looked at her own dark uniform. "I don't see even one," she said, "but I'll have to be careful. I'll change when I go in. Are you really as bad as that?"
"I tried to clean myself up a bit," he said. "But I have been awful. That's the thing I hate most about the whole business. I've got used to all the other discomforts long ago, and to everything else."
"Even to the killing of human beings, Mike?"
"Yes," he said. "Even to the killing of brave men. I know what you're saying to yourself—I thought that too, I thought it would send me mad, I longed to kill myself to get out of it. But, in an attack, when you've seen your own jolly pals, who have lived in the trenches with you, bleeding and tattered, spatchcocked against barbed wire, and had to leave them sticking to it, their eyes haunt you, your blood gets up, you long for a hundred hands to shoot with, instead of only two. When you've seen the result of Prussian militarism on decent German soldiers, you know that it's your duty to destroy it, to give the German people, as well as the rest of the world, their freedom and rights."