Through his glasses the colonel gazed into the depths of the ravine, where the white stone château glinted through the dark, thickly surrounding trees. A wisp of smoke ascended from one of the chimneys and he had to be content with that assurance that all was well. A patrol sent out in the first light had failed to reach it. All access to the château was commanded by spurs from the other side of the ravine. But apparently it was unoccupied by the enemy. He thought suddenly of the dog, wondered what had happened to it. In the stress of the night attack he had lost sight of it, forgotten it. Even as he searched his memory it came bounding along the trench towards him, nosed against his leg. There was something fastened to its collar, a letter. As he read it, all the passion of his ascetic, sun-parched years, awakened by the exquisite charm of that slender pale woman lonely there below him, surged up in him, overmastering, obliterating all else. The eloquent eyes under the auburn hair were vivid to him, spoke to his deepest soul. Her letter was a prose lyric of passion wherein all emotions--longing, tenderness, anxiety, surrender, pride in her lover, even a flash of the doubt born of swiftly-given love--contended. It was revelatory of her inmost self as her speech had never been. She, it seemed, had also waited--waited. Some of the phrases in it--"The burning sacrament of your kiss"--"linked in an instant for eternity"--branded themselves upon his brain. In a whirl of cerebral excitement he tore out a page from his note-book, dashed off a letter not less ardent, not less than hers the ecstasy of a soul that lives at last in the consuming fire of love. He attached it to the dog's collar, pointed away. The animal sprang over the low parapet, disappeared in the undergrowth below. An artillery officer came up, reported himself as the observer of the newly arrived battery. He evinced much professional interest in the château, seemed eager to make it the target for his guns. The colonel explained the situation. All through the multitudinous tasks and responsibilities of the day his soul yearned out to the lonely woman below. To have risked his life in an endeavour to see her would have been more than a joy, it would have been the satisfaction of a need of his being--but his life was pledged to France. To him his duty was a religion with which his love did not conflict, nay both, upon the summit of his life, blended and were one. Yet tempted, he found himself speculating upon the possibility of creeping down at nightfall.