His mind leapt back to Kabul; to the doings of a little Corps of Guides, Hamilton, Jenkyns, Kelly and the rest. Who remembered those deathless heroes now? Hamilton, the most intrepid, he who had charged over two thousand of the enemy, first with four men, and then with three, and last of all alone, had his memorial in stone at Dublin. But stone cannot speak or glow. Cold and immovable, it is the symbol of a nation’s heart. Yet the call of one’s country is strong. Now, at this moment, when he, the strong man, wavered between allegiance to her service and denial of her claims, weighing duty in the scale with happiness, her voice rose with the calm insistence which drives a man to do the thing he would not—to achieve what, humanly speaking, we should call impossible. Peace and ease might have been Farquharson’s in Taorna—life with the woman he loved. He knew his power; he underrated Evelyn’s. He faced again in that moment the temptation to take her away against her will, maybe, strong in the certainty that he could satisfy her, that they would find together something which the average man and woman could never attain. But the voice of the nation spoke, implacably. "I want you. You must stay. I shall bruise and break you. No matter, you are dust, you can return to the dust from which you came. You may ride in my car of progress day and night, neither sleeping nor resting so long as your wits are keen and your intellect alert. Once your eyes fail or your hand trembles, I shall have no further use for you. From nothing you came, to nothing you may then return. But my car will go on, and you will have driven it for a little time." Yes, he must stay. And if he stayed, he must make this sacrifice for Evelyn; he must give up his dearest dream. For, grimly as he faced life as a whole, he had always cherished the thought of marriage as his one hope of human salvation. What he had said to Evelyn was true; not mere words, but conviction. He believed that a man should only give himself in marriage to the one woman who could make an equal gift of mind, body and soul, the supreme trinity of surrender. Marriage was a sacrament—marriage as God instituted it, not the false union that convention recognized. "And now the dream must go," he said aloud. His thoughts went back to the old phrase of the picture gallery when he had spoken to Dan. "Yes, dreams are only made to break, I suppose." He got up. "Since one woman is as much or as little to me as another, if I can’t have Eve as my wife—I’ll leave it to chance, and propose to the first unmarried woman, if she will let me, who speaks to me to-night at Hare’s."