"You've left it very late," he said. "We expect every hour the Bulgarian declaration of war upon the Entente. Ah, this disastrous summer! The failure at the Dardanelles! The failure of the Russians! And now I doubt if we shall do anything but cluster here upon the frontier like birds gathering to go south." "I am going south," Sylvia murmured. "I wish that I were," he sighed. "Now is the moment to strike. When I think of the Bulgarians on the other side of the river, and of my troop--such splendid fellows--waiting and waiting! Sylvia, I am filled with intuitions of my country's fate. Wherever I look the clouds are black. If when you are back in England you read one day that Rumania is fighting with you, do not remember the tawdry side of her, but think of us waiting here in the fog, waiting and waiting. If--and God forbid that you should read this--if you read that Rumania is fighting against you, think that one insignificant lieutenant of cavalry will hope to fall very early upon a Russian bayonet." He held her for a moment in the folds of his bedewed cloak, while they listened to the slow lapping of the river; then she mounted the gangway, and the ferry glided into the fog. There was a very long wait at Rustchuk; but Sylvia did not find the Bulgarian officials discourteous; in fact, for the representatives of a country upon the verge of going to war with her own, they were pleasant and obliging. It was after midnight before the train left Rustchuk, and some time before dawn that it reached Gorna Orechovitza, where it seemed likely to wait forever. A chill wind was blowing down from the Balkans, which had swept the junction clear of everybody except a squat Bulgarian soldier who marched up and down in his dark-green overcoat, stamping his feet; so little prospect was there of the train starting again, that all the station officials were dozing round a stove in the buffet, and the passengers had gone back to their _couchettes_. To Sylvia the desolation was exhilarating with a sense of adventure. Rumania had already receded far away--at any rate, the tawdry side of it--and the only picture that remained was of Philidor upon the bank of that misty river. It seemed to her now that the whole of the past eighteen months had been a morbid night, such a new and biting sense of reality was blown down from the mountains upon this windy October dawn, such magical horizons were being written across this crimson sky.