“Quite. She will go back to Germany after the war, I suppose.”
“Will you give her a message for me?”
“If you wish.”
The dry, slightly hesitant tone meant, “If you will be so foolish.”
“Tell her for The Guardian,” said Jem, “that this feller has n’t laid down. Tell her that he won’t lay down”—he paused, and then completed the paraphrase—“though Hell from beneath is moved for him to meet him at his coming.”
“Put that on your editorial page,” said Miss Pritchard, with a thrill in her voice. “I’d like Marcia to see it there.”
“Perhaps I will when the day comes,” he answered and took his leave.
It was the first message that he had sent to Marcia Ames since they had parted at the door of the Pritchard mansion nearly four years before. Every sense of her, every thought of her, was as vivid, unblurred, untainted by time as if she had gone from him yesterday: “the loveliness that wanes not, the Love that ne’er can wane.” Now, even by so tenuous a thread as his impersonal message for The Guardian, he held to her again. And in his heart sang something lesser but sweeter than hope.