All he was doing now was to take away her dreams--the one thing that had saved her. He was not changing other conditions in the slightest. He was making them even worse. Did he think she wanted to go back to Miss Wilmer’s and watch him hold her hand? She felt the venomous sting of a new emotion--of jealousy. The poison works swiftly in such natures as hers. In the meanwhile Allston had come to some realization of the problem he faced. Another man might have been quicker, but another man would not have been Allston. That the girl had her romantic moments he was aware--every one, man or woman, has those; but that she had carried them as far as this he had never suspected. His mind had been far too occupied in another direction. Even on his way up here when, under the stress of the struggle, he had sensed something of the significance of her act and that in a way it involved him, he had not associated it with love. Rather had it seemed like a magnificently impersonal poetic idea. For two years, in France, he had been in touch often with just this sort of thing. Again and again he had seen it govern the fine acts of men and women--of young men and women. Under the spell of it he had seen them make sacrifices that staggered the imagination. Sometimes it was in the name of country; sometimes in the name of duty; sometimes in the name of honor; sometimes in the name of gratitude--but always it was utterly impersonal. To him Roxie from the beginning had seemed of this type. She reminded him in many ways of those extraordinary young peasant women with whom he had come into such fleeting contact--the women with the liquid black eyes so quick to respond to elemental emotions, but so steady withal as one saw them in their mothers and grandmothers. Somehow Allston had always understood them enough to respect them, which could not be said of some of his fellow officers. He had glimpsed the finer stuff that lay below the tempting smiles, and understood, too, something of the abnormal conditions under which they were living.