I got up from the sofa and walked up and down the room. It was a handsome room, large, many-windowed and high, but strangely gloomy. The electric light was so heavily shaded that there were grim corners. One might have thought that the wings of the Dark Angel hovered in the recesses, as he waited--waited--waited. And, though the month was August, there came up from the sea, hardly more than a stone's-throw away, a sobbing that had something so much like human grief in it that it made one understand how it was that in the ominous spring of 1914 the village people of Russia kept on saying that they heard the earth crying and that there would be war. Vera Brennan's small head had sunk lower and lower. She spoke to me without looking at me: "You know I love Roland, don't you?" "Yes," I answered her. "I know you love him." "I can't help it," she said almost piteously. "I never loved anyone before. I never thought I should love anyone at all. My mind was all on other things. But he woke me up. I loved him directly I saw him and heard him speak. Of course, I know he's very young, but with him age doesn't seem to matter. He's a grown man in his mind and heart. He's everything to me now--everything." I said nothing, but kept on walking up and down the room. She went on, more and more appealingly: "He knows I'm saying all this to you. You see, he's told me all about you. He said that if I loved him I must love you, too, because you and he were like one life. And that is why I want to say this to you--that I love him so very much that I want to think of him more than of myself--that, if you think it would be better for him that I should give him up and all my own life's happiness with him, I can do it and I will do it. Yes, I will find strength to do it--if you say I must." She had stretched out her arms towards me from the deeper gloom in which she sat. And suddenly I realised, that, small and flowerlike and fragile though she was, she was not a girl who was going to take my treasure from me, but a woman who was asking me to let her share with me the pride and the anguish of living under the black shadow of Fear that had darkened my life for four months past. I turned and went to her quickly and sat down on the sofa beside her and took her into my arms. We did not speak a word, but we stayed there like that for a long, long time--until the Boy's voice suddenly startled us: "What are you doing here all this time? It's three o'clock. You will both be ill." "Roland! I thought you were in bed and asleep." "No. I tried to lie down, but I couldn't. I've been walking up and down the corridor." He was stooping over us both, drawing us up. His boyish face had become suddenly the face of a man, his voice was the voice of a man, and his touch and his manner had a man's power and a man's dignity. It was nearly four o'clock when I went to say good-night to him.