"Drop your face on my shoulder," she said.
His wasted cheek seemed feverish, burning against her breast.
"Steady, Kay," she whispered.
"Right!… What got me was the thought of you—there when the grenades fell…. They blew a black pit where your blanket lay!"
He lifted his head and she smiled into the fever-bright eyes set so deeply now in his ravaged visage. There were words on her lips, trembling to be uttered. But she dared not believe they would add to his strength if spoken. He loved her. She had long known that—had long understood that loving her had not hardened his capacity for the dogged duty which lay before him.
To win out was a task sufficiently desperate; to win out and bring her through alive was the double task that was slowly, visibly killing this man whose burning, sunken eyes gazed into hers. She dared not triple that task; the cry in her heart died unuttered, lest he ever waver in duty to his country when in some vital crisis that sacred duty clashed with the obligations that fettered him to a girl who had confessed she loved him.
No; the strength that he might derive from such a knowledge was not that deathless energy and clear thinking necessary to blind, stern, unswerving devotion to the motherland. Love of woman, and her love given, could only make the burden of decision triply heavy for this man who stood staring at space beside her here in the forest twilight where shreds of the night mist floated like ghosts and a lost sunspot glowed and waned and glowed on last year's leaves.
The girl pressed her waist with his arm, straightened her shoulders and stood erect; and with a quick gesture cleared her brow of its cloudy golden hair.
"Now," she said coolly, "we carry on, you and I, Kay, to the honour and glory of the land that trusts us in her hour of need… Are you are right again?"
"All right, Yellow-hair," he said pleasantly.