“Listen to me, Michael,” she said. “I can’t bear any longer that these horrors should keep rising up between us, and, while we are here in the middle of it all, it can’t be otherwise. I ask you, then, to come away with me, to leave it all behind. It is not our quarrel. Already Hermann has gone; I can’t lose you too.”
She looked up at him for a moment, and then quickly away again, for she felt her case, which seemed to her just now so imperative, slipping away from her in that glance she got of his eyes, that, for all the love that burned there, were blank with astonishment. She must convince him; but her own convictions were weak when she looked at him.
“Don’t answer me yet,” she said. “Hear what I have to say. Don’t you see that while we are like this we are lost to each other? And as you yourself said just now, nothing matters in comparison to our love. I want you to take me away, out of it all, so that we can find each other again. These horrors thwart and warp us; they spoil the best thing that the world holds for us. My patriotism is just as sound as yours, but I throw it away to get you. Do the same, then. You can get out of your service somehow. . . .”
“If you loved me, you would do it,” she said. “If--”
And then suddenly she found she could say no more at all. She had hoped that when she stated these things she would convince him, and, behold, all she had done was to shake her own convictions so that they fell clattering round her like an unstable card-house. Desperately she looked again at him, wondering if she had convinced him at all, and then again she looked, wondering if she should see contempt in his eyes. After that she stood still and silent, and her face flamed.
“Oh, my dear, how I love you for suggesting such a sweet impossibility,” he said. “But how you would despise me if I consented.”
She gave a sorrowful semblance of a laugh.
“And I know you would. You would contrast me in your mind, whether you wished to or not, with Hermann, with poor Francis, sorely to my disadvantage.”
They sat silent a little, but there was another question Sylvia had to ask for which she had to collect her courage. At last it came.
“Have they told you yet when you are going?” she said.
