Whatever wind reached this slope had dropped at nightfall, and in the darkness Sylvia felt like a kiss upon her cheek the salt breath of the mighty mother to which her heart responded in awe as to the breath of liberty. It had been a strange experience, this month with Rakoff and his band, and seemed already, though the sound of the riding had scarcely died away from her senses, the least credible episode of a varied life. Yet, looking back at the incidents of each day, Sylvia could not remember that her wild companions had ever been conscious of Michael and herself as intruders upon their monotonously violent behavior. Even Ziska, that riddle of flaxen womanhood, had gradually reached a kind of remote cordiality toward their company. To be sure, she had not invited Sylvia to grasp, or even faintly to guess, the reasons that might have induced her to adopt such a mode of life; she had never afforded the least hint of her relationship to Rakoff; she had never attempted to justify her cold, almost it might have been called her prim mercilessness. Yet she had sometimes advised Sylvia to withdraw from a prospective exhibition of atrocity, and this not from any motive of shame, but always obviously because she had been considering the emotions of her guest. It was in this spirit, when once a desperate Serbian peasant had flung a stone at the departing troop, that she advised Sylvia to ride on and avoid the fall of mangled limbs that was likely to occur after shutting twenty villagers in a barn and blowing them up with a charge of dynamite. She had spoken of the unpleasant sequel as simply as a meteorologist might have spoken of the weather's breaking up. Michael and Sylvia used to wonder to each other what prevented them from turning their ponies' heads and galloping off anywhere to escape this daily exposure to the sight of unchecked barbarity; but they could never bring themselves to pass the limits of expediency and lose themselves in the uncertainties of an ideal morality; ultimately they always came back to the fundamental paradox of war and agreed that in a state of war the life of the individual increased in value in the same proportion as it deteriorated. Rakoff had taken pleasure in commenting upon their attitude, and once or twice he had been at pains to convince them of the advantages they now enjoyed of an intellectual honesty from which in England, so far as he had been able to appreciate criticism of that country, they would have been eternally debarred. But perhaps no amount of intellectual honesty would have enabled them to remain quiescent before the rapine and slaughter of which they were compelled to be cognizant if not actually to see, had not the journey itself healed their wounded conscience with a charm against which they were powerless. The air of the mountains swept away the taint of death that would otherwise have reeked in the very accoutrements of the equipage. The