‘Mariella, you must marry me, you must, you _must_. Oh, Mariella, I _do_ want to marry you, and I’m going to the front so I _do_ think I might be allowed to have what I want. I may be killed and I shan’t have had anything out of life. Oh, Mariella, please! You know you’re happiest with us, Mariella. You couldn’t marry anyone outside and leave us all, could you? Nor could I. I couldn’t bear to be _touched_ by any other woman. You and I understand each other so well we _couldn’t_ be unhappy. We are different from other people, you know. Marry me and I’ll come back from the war. But if you say no I’ll just go out and let myself be killed at once....’ And Mariella, pale and childish and not understanding, went away. She went--yes--to Julian, and looking at him full with her dazed look said: ‘Charlie has asked me to marry him.’ He said not a word, but looked dark and shrugged his shoulders and turned away as who should reply: ‘What is that to me?’ So Mariella went straight back to Charlie and said: ‘All right.’ Her mouth quivered and she nearly cried then, but not quite: neither then nor afterwards. And the grandmother wept bitterly, till in the end Charlie comforted her; and after that, implacably she would give and sacrifice all to Charlie. No, no, that was too stupid, too abnormal. People only behaved like that in your unbalanced imagination. Mariella would never have wept, never have gone to Julian, never dreamed of being in love with him,--him or Charlie or any one else you would have thought, childless, sexless creature that she had always seemed, years behind you in development. How she must have changed to be now liable to passion! All at once she had to be thought of as a woman, the gulf of marriage fixed between you and her. Had she consented then in her usual placidly agreeable way, just to oblige Charlie, without a notion of what it meant to be in love and marry? Had she gradually fallen in love with him during all the years they were growing up together, or had it been suddenly, with a shock of realization, when he told her he was going to France? Or had he come home one day excited, full of emotion at the thought of what lay ahead for him, and found her looking beautiful, strange, and thrilling to his troubled eyes, and taken her suddenly in his arms, charming her into his own illusion of love? Or had it been gentle and certain all the time,--an idyll? ‘My dear, you know I shall never love anyone but you.’ ‘Nor I anyone but you.’ ‘Then let’s marry before I go.’ ‘Oh yes,--at once.’ So they married, with all the others gentle and certain, and acquiescent as a matter of course, saying, whatever their secret thoughts: ‘Ah well, it had to be.’ They would spend their few days contentedly together, saying quietly: ‘If anything should happen we shall have had this happiness at least:’ their few nights....