He tried again: "I love you, Lorraine—"
Her straight brows knitted and she struggled to free herself.
"Let me go!" she whispered. "I do not wish to live—I can't!—I can't!"
Then he played his last card, and, holding her close, looked straight into her eyes.
"France needs us all," he said.
She grew quiet. Suddenly the warm blood dyed her cheeks. Then, drop by drop, the tears came; her sweet face, wet and flushed, nestled quietly close to his own face.
"We will both live for that," he said; "we will do what we can."
For an hour she lay sobbing her heart out in his arms; and when she was quiet at last he told her how the land lay trembling under the invasion, how their armies had struggled and dwindled and lost ground, how France, humbled, drenched with blood and tears, still stood upright calling to her children. He spoke of the dead, the dying, the mutilated creatures gasping out their souls in the ditches.
"Life is worth living," he said. "If our place is not in the field with the wounded, not in the hospital, not in the prisons where these boys are herded like diseased cattle, then it is perhaps at the shrine's foot. Pray for France, Lorraine, pray and work, for there is work to do."
"There is work; we will go together," she whispered.