She fought with sobs, and the tears she could not keep back fell in the darkness on her husband's face. His own were mingled with them. Perhaps she knew it, as she wiped them away with a touch that was a caress, saying:
"We must not give in! We must not fail him! To abandon hope too soon would be to fail!"
Courage had come to her with the paling of the stars and the greying in the East that meant the dayspring. She was full of solicitude for Saxham's weariness, as he rose up stiffly as a knight who has watched his armour through the long hours, kneeling on the threshold of the Sanctuary, and knows with the waning of the flame in the lamp before the Tabernacle that his vigil is over and done.
"You are tired—so tired! Dear Owen, go to bed now, if only for an hour or two. There will be news of him very soon now—there must be news!"
Saxham took a delicate fleecy wrap from a chair and put it about her, for she shivered in the raw chill of the unsunned morning air. Then he touched the blind, and it rolled up upon a vista of backyard and garage. The shriek of an engine and the vibrating passage of an early train through Portland Road Tube Railway came into their ears, standing together at the open window, as Dawn in her streaming crocus veil peeped shyly through the vast smoke-bank that broods upon the morning face of London, engendered by the innumerable little fires of those among her five millions who must rise and eat, and go forth to labour ere yet it is fairly day.
"Owen, tell me! What is coming? What is it I feel, here and here?"
She turned upon her husband suddenly with the question, touching her brow and heart lightly and fixing on him her widely opened eyes. The haunted look of Beatrice had come back to them. His wife's strange likeness to the Guido portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery—the tragic face with the wistful eyes, that despite the asseverations of the learned and critical will be associated as long as its canvas hangs together with the Daughter of the Cenci—leaped up in her at this hour to startle him afresh.
"What is in the air?" she asked. "What changes are taking place about us? What great and horrible Thing is moving,—moving towards us as we stand together here?"
Saxham's powerful arm went round her protectingly. He answered:
"You shall know, my love, my comrade. In confidence—I am permitted to tell you this much. We stand upon the very brink of international War!"