She looked at him and in the golden eyes he read courage, endurance and tenderness. Love that would be changeless. Fidelity through life beyond Death to the Life that is for evermore.
"You mean that Austro-Hungary will attack Servia, and that Russia will intervene?"
"As Austria intends, no doubt," said Saxham shrugging, "prompted by her Mentor and Ally at Berlin. In him we have a personality blatantly vain, immensely egoistic, feverishly energetic, imbued to the verge of monomania with the idea of his own appointment by the Almighty—as they understand Him in Germany—to be Imperial leader of nations and arbiter of the destinies of Kings!"
He went on:
"Suppose the Great Powers of the World a row of straw bee-skeps, susceptible of being upset by a Hohenzollern kick! Will the mailed toe of Imperial Germany refrain from giving it—invading France through the lost Alsace-Lorraine provinces, the moment Austria-Hungary gets to grips with the Russian bear? Britain is France's ally, bound in Honour to support her. Now you understand what vital questions the Chancellories of the world were burning electric light and brain-power and eyesight over, the long night through, while you and I——"
She stopped him:
"You make me think!—You have told me—That man who has taken my darling is a German Flying Officer. He may have had some urgent, secret reason for quitting England at once!"
"It is more than probable that he carried dispatches of importance. But I can answer no questions on that point. I should be verging, if I did, on a betrayal of confidence."
Lynette Saxham looked at her husband earnestly, and the change wrought in her by the long night's vigil of sorrow sent a pang through the man's heart. That line of anxiety between the slender eyebrows and the bluish shadows round the golden eyes came to him, like the sorrowful sweetness of the exquisite lips, out of the past.
"Why do the Germans hate us?" she asked, and he answered wearily and sombrely: