"Should I have said to you what I have if I didn't?" She held out her hand to him, and with a quick movement he put it to his lips. "I've grown, you see . . . got a little nearer the true value of things. I've passed out of the promiscuous kissing stage, as I told you. . . . And I think I realise rather more than I did what men are. . . . One doesn't make them up out of books now. All this has taught one to understand a man's temptations--to forgive him when he fails." Then a little irrelevantly--"They seem so petty, don't they--now?" Vane gently dropped the hand he was holding, and his face as he looked at her was inscrutable. Into his mind there had flashed Lear's question: "And goes thy _heart_ with this?" Then irritably he banished it. . . . God bless her! She was all heart: of course she was. "Will you tell me where exactly you have arrived at?" he asked quietly. "At the certainty that there lies in front of you and me work to be done. I don't know what that work will prove to be--but, Derek, we've got to find out. It may be that we shall do it together. It may be that my work is just to be with you. And it may be that it isn't that you won't want me. Ah! yes, dear," as he made a quick, impatient movement. "There is always the possibility. I want you to go and find out, Derek, and I want you to make sure that you really want me--that it isn't just six months in Flanders. Also," she added after a pause, "I want to be quite sure about myself." For a while Vane stared out to sea in silence. "Supposing," he said slowly, "the work in front of me is back to Flanders again, as it probably will be. And supposing I'm not so lucky next time. What then?" She turned and faced him. "Why then, dear, Fate will have decided for us, won't she?" "A deuced unsatisfactory decision," grumbled Vane. "Margaret, I don't want to worry you; I don't want to force myself on you . . . but won't you give me some sort of a promise?" She shook her head. "I'll give you no promise at all, Derek. You've got to find yourself, and I've got to find myself; and when we've both done that we shall know how we stand to one another. Until then . . . well just give it a miss in baulk, old man." Vane regarded her curiously. "If last night and this afternoon had happened before the war, I wonder what your decision would have been?" "Does it matter?" she answered gently. "Before the war is just a different age." For a while she was silent; then she drew a deep breath. "Don't you feel it as I feel it?" she whispered. "The bigness of it, the wonder of it. Underneath all the horror, underlying all the vileness--the splendour of it all. The glory of human endurance. . . . People wondered that I could stand it--I with my idealism. But it seems to me that out of the sordid brutality an ideal has been born which is almost the greatest the world has ever known. Oh! Derek, we've just got to try to keep it alive."