“I should not have been here,” he began vaguely. “Some one may see you talking with me.”
“Don’t speak of that!... Oh, words are such puny things now! I thought we understood each other about that. Tell me, are you ill? You look——”
“No, not ill, Noreen. I shall be tiptop when I get up yonder into the field.... You startled me. I think I was in a kind of dream about you, and then you——” The old dread returned to his mind. He wondered if the man who had passed had been Finacune. “Are you alone? I wouldn’t have anybody see you talking to me.”
All that was in her heart was called forth by the spectacle of her giant’s pallor and seeming weakness. Proudly she put all this into words:
“I would not care if the whole world saw me with you. It is the same with me—as I told you on the way to Charing Cross! What you may think—does not make me afraid. You have done no wrong. I want to be with you—but the time is not yet come. It is dreadful. Why do you forget all that we told each other—all that I told you?”
“I have not forgotten,” he said huskily. “The scars of that hour in the carriage—leaving you that hour—would not suffer me to forget, but I should not speak this way. I wrong you speaking this way. I am only a world-tramp between wars.... And this war I must watch alone—from the edge where the others do not go. God, what a coward I should be—to chance your happiness——”
The launch whistled—a tearing in her brain. The call to her father was instant and inexorable.... But she clung to Routledge—drew him to the very edge of the stone-pier, blind to the glances of men and women who brushed by.
“Quick, tell me of Jerry!” he said. “Is he out for the war?”
“My father is dying a slow death out yonder on the ship. I must go to him. Already he is dead to wars and friends—all but dead to me!” She added imperiously, “When my work is finished with him, I shall keep my promise, Routledge-san. I shall come to you!”
“No—I’m going where you could not follow——”