Talliaferro stopped, startled by the look in the face of the woman. Her eyes were wide, almost electric with suffering, her face colorless. The lamp-light heightened the effects; also her dress, which was of black entire. Talliaferro noted such things. He always remembered her hand that moment, as it was raised to check him, white, fragile, emotional.
“What is it, Miss Cardinegh?” he asked quickly.
“I was thinking,” she replied steadily, “that Mr. Routledge is there in all likelihood—‘playing the Chinese end,’ as you call it. I was thinking that he might not have heard that he is vindicated—that he might be murdered before he learned that my father had confessed.”
She hurried away before the dinner was half through, and Talliaferro was left to dislike himself, for a short period, for bringing up the Butzel murder.... Noreen sat again by the window in her room. The story had frightened her, so that she felt the need of being alone to think. The dreadfulness of the night before did not return, however.... The moon rose high to find the Wall again—every part of it, winding in the mountains.... Was it not possible that Talliaferro was over-conscious of the dangers of the Chinese end? Routledge had been up there, possibly since the Yalu battle, and he had proved a master in these single-handed services of his.... She had heard of Talliaferro’s capacity to command the highest price, heard of him as an editorial dictator and of his fine grasp on international affairs, but her father had once remarked that the Excalibur “did not relish dangling his body in the dirty area between two firing lines.”... There was hope in her heart, and she slept.
“Please don’t apologize, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said the next morning, when he met her sorrowfully. “It is I who should apologize. For a moment you made me see vividly the dangers up yonder, but I put it all away and had a real rest. Tell me about the field and Oku.”
Talliaferro was inclined to talk very little, as a rule, but he had brooded deeply upon his failure in this service, and it was rather a relief to speak—with Noreen Cardinegh to listen.
“At least, we have added to the gaiety of nations with our silence in the field,” he said. “It has been the silence of the Great Wall yonder. We knew nothing even of the main strategy, which was familiar to all outside who cared to follow the war. Japanese officers were assigned to overhear what we said to one another. They even opened our personal mail. The field-telegraph was hot day and night with the war-business, so that our messages were hung up for days, even with the life cut out of them. And then when Oku drove into action we were always back with the reserves—not that I think a correspondent can do a battle classic for his cable-editor, simply because he mingles first hand with shrapnel; but we had only the sun and stars to go by as to which was north and south. Think of it, and the man who writes a war-classic must have a conception of the whole land and sea array, and an inner force of his own, to make his sentences shine——”
She smiled a little and straightened her shoulders to breathe deeply the good sea air. They were walking out toward the Wall.
“But suppose he has the big conception, as you say, and then goes into the heart of the thing”—her voice became tense—“where the poor brave brutes are coming together to die?”
“He’ll unquestionably do it better,” said Talliaferro, regarding her blowing hair with satisfaction to the artistic sense he cultivated. “Physical heroism is cheap—the cheapest utility of the nations—but it is not without inspiration to watch.... We had neither—neither facts nor blood with Oku.”