“There it is again!” she cried in triumph. “The war! You’ll study and work, the way men do. Yours will be all the brave part, the fighting and broken heads; mine’s only--the risking. Perhaps they come back with the trumpets and flags and everything, or blind, on a crutch, or never at all. Do you think I didn’t know that? Why, we’re only--we’re all poor river-drivers in the brook together. Go on, go out! Till you’re out and away, I’ll never come back here in the world!” “Anna!” he cried, and could only repeat that name, as though it were the whole revelation. She, and she alone, had opened a great window in his world. Never before had he felt life to be so dangerous and inspiring, or himself, in the vast welter, so puny and so invincible. For him, she had cut the bonds of Prometheus; for herself--she stood there unchanged, the same distant sea-light on her face, the same wavering smile. A sacrifice to youth had mounted here, in common words, on a common hill of bare granite, yellow grass, and mullein, and to his disgrace, all the offering seemed hers, and all the wonder. “But I can’t,” he said. “You must promise when--” “No,” she answered quickly. “Let’s not have promises. This much is ours; the rest we can’t tell.” He gave an inarticulate cry. “I won’t have it!” he floundered angrily. “We can’t go, this way. I won’t let you!” “Miles!” She checked him, very sternly. “What about the other time? Ella told me. You promised something once before, not just to him, but--all the others. You almost--Had you better make any more promises yet?” He felt his cheeks burn, and was unfit to lift his eyes toward her. “Don’t you see,” she went on with an altered voice, “why we stopped right in this place?” He saw only the parched grass quivering between them, and about their feet a silly multitude of grasshoppers snapping upward with thin, dry clicks, to sail in short curves deflected by the wind. In some former silence it had been so; but where he could not tell, nor could he raise his head out of this present shame. Far more visible before him lay his broken purpose, stripped of all disguise and easy palliation. “Do you see why?” said Anna once more, and when he still made no answer, suddenly clapped her hands like a child. “I’ve made him mad, I’ve made him mad!” she chanted. “Now he’ll fight like a trooper!” She laughed, a queer, short, hurried laugh, and went on breathlessly. “We say good-by here because it’s the best place. And you don’t remember it! And I do, and always did and always will, and I told you a dreadful fib in the boat, for the morning was just like this, and the grasshoppers just the same, and you had the thorn in your cheek, right exactly--there!”