And I told her, in the most fervent manner in my power.
"You quite understand?" she said, standing up, looking very young and princess-like, her white throat gleaming between her furs and up-turned chin.
"You will find, my dear," said I, "that the significance of your Dead March of a Marionette will increase every day of your married life."
She stiffened in a sudden stroke of passion, looking, for the instant, electrically beautiful.
"I wish," she cried, "someone had written the Dead March of a Devil."
She bent down, kissed me, and went out in a whirr of furs and draperies.
Of course, all I could do was to scratch my thin iron-grey hair and light a cigar and meditate in front of the fire. I knew all about it—or at any rate I thought I did, which, as far as my meditation in front of the fire is concerned, comes to the same thing.
Betty had cast out the base metal of her love for Leonard Boyce in order to accept the pure gold of the love of Willie Connor. So she thought, poor girl. She had been in love with Boyce. She had been engaged to Boyce. Boyce, for some reason or the other, had turned her down. Spretae injuria formae—she had cast Boyce aside. But for all her splendid surrender of her womanhood to Willie Connor, for the sake of her country, she still loved Leonard Boyce. Or, if she wasn't in love with him, she couldn't get him out of her head or her senses. Something like that, anyhow. I don't pretend to know exactly what goes on in the soul or nature, or whatever it is, of a young girl, who has given her heart to a man. I can only use the crude old phrase: she was still in love (in some sort of fashion) with Leonard Boyce, and she was going to marry, for the highest motives, somebody else.
"Confound the fellow," said I, with an irritable gesture and covered myself with cigar ash.
She had called Boyce a devil and implied a wish that he were dead. For myself I did not know what to make of him, for reasons which I will state. I never approved of the engagement. As a matter of fact, I knew—and was one of the very few who knew—of a black mark against him—the very blackest mark that could be put against a soldier's name. It was a puzzling business. And when I say I knew of the mark, I must be candid and confess that its awful justification lies in the conscience of one man living in the world to-day—if indeed he be still alive.