"You have your mother--his mother--to think of. You have your son," Sylvia argued. "Neither mother nor son could be any excuse for leaving Michael at such a moment." "Certainly not, if you could not find a substitute. But I shall stay here in any case, and you've no right to desert other obligations," Sylvia affirmed. "You're talking to me in a ridiculous way. There is only one obligation, which is to him." "Do you think you can do more for him than I can do?" Sylvia challenged. "You can do less. You have already had the fearful strain of getting him here from the north. You are worn out. You are not fit to nurse him as he must be nursed. You are not fit to deal with the Bulgarians when they come. You are already breaking down. Why, there is no force in your arguments! They are as tame and conventional as if you were inventing an excuse to break a social engagement." "But by what right do you make this--this violent demand?" asked the other. There suddenly came over Sylvia the futility of discussing the question in this fashion: this flickering room, echoing faintly to the shouts of the affrighted fugitives in the distance, lacked any atmosphere to hide the truth, for which in its bareness and misery it seemed to cry aloud. The question that his sister had put demanded an answer that would evade nothing in the explanation of her request; and if that answer should leave her soul stripped and desolate for the contemptuous regard of a woman who could not comprehend, why then thus was her destiny written and she should stand humiliated while the life that she had not been great enough to seize passed out of her reach. "If my demand is violent, my need is violent," she cried. "Once, in my dressing-room--the only time we met--you told me that you half regretted your rejection of art; you envied me my happiness in success. Your envy seemed to me then the bitterest irony, for I could not find in art that which I demanded. I have never found it until now in the chance to save your brother's life. That is exaggerating, you'll say. Yet I do believe--and if you could know my history you would believe it, too--I do believe that my will can save him now not merely from death, but from the captivity that will follow. I know what it feels like to recover from this fever; and I know that he will not wish to see you and himself prisoners. He will fret himself ill again about your position. I am nothing to him. He will never know that we changed places deliberately. He will accept me as a companion in misfortune, and I will give all that love can give, love that feeds upon and inflames itself without demanding fuel except from the heart of the one who loves. You cannot refuse me now, my dear--so dear to me because you are his sister. You cannot refuse me when I ask you to let me stay because I love him." "Do you love Michael?" asked the other, wonderingly.