Perhaps, in her dreams, she had followed him up here; perhaps, in her dreams, she was now looking to see what he was about. The continued silence began to rouse his imagination. It did so even in the face of the startling reality he was still confronting. With Roxie’s heart beating against his arm, it was not of her he thought, but of this other. If Allston had been timid in his mental approach to Wilmer before, he was bold enough now. With a possible margin of only five hours of life ahead, a man must needs be bold if ever. True values assert themselves willy-nilly in such a crisis. He had realized from the moment of Bud’s escape that never had the desire to live been so keen in him, and in the next few hours he learned why. In France he had faced death even more intimately than he was doing to-night and had done it with a certain indifference. Not that he was either dulled or depressed; not that he was insensitive to what life meant or that he sought escape from its responsibilities. He was then in an utterly negative state with the issue completely out of his hands. And he had seen so much of death that it had lost its horror. About the only distinction he made between live men and dead men was that the former were still able to move. The latter lay quietly where they crumpled up--sometimes for days. He had passed groups of such immobile forms as unemotionally as he passed broken tree branches. On his mission up here to-night, he had not considered death either one way or the other, although he had sensed his danger. Roxie herself was the one who finally brought him face to face with a full realization of the issue. It was she who had finally forced the fatal situation. And she had done this, unwittingly and unconsciously, in the name of love. Humbly and out of a full heart he drew his arm tighter, and she opened her eyes and looked up into his face and smiled. Lord, what was this thing called love? It was symbolized as a winged cherub and expressed in terms of June roses, and yet it drove men relentlessly to the very brink, and over, of death. And women, too; young women scarcely out of girlhood. And it drove men on to life when death would be simpler. Allston did not want to die. He wanted to get back to Wilmer. Give him one more hour alone with her and he would beat down her reserve--would sweep her into his arms and hold her there. He had been playing with love. He had not realized the bigness of his passion. It had seemed to him some dainty, fragile emotion to be handled as cautiously as a delicate vase. And love was one of the two vital things of a man’s being. There were only two; love and death. Everything else was trivial. And love was neither of the intellect nor of the heart. It was of the soul. That day in the cove when he had seized Wilmer’s hand, his soul had spoken. It had bid him take, then and there. She had drawn back from him--yes. But that was because he was half-hearted. He had not pressed on.