I should probably not have interfered with it had the circumstances not raised us above the sphere of our ordinary interests. The roar of the wind, the tumult of the sea, the plunging of the ship, the indescribable whining of shells, the knowledge of danger—were as the orchestra which lifts the duet to emotional planes that dialogue alone could never attain to. Though our words might be commonplace, every syllable was charged with tones and overtones and undertones of meaning to be seized by something more subtle than intelligence. Prudence might have said, “Let everything alone,” but that urging of the being which escapes the leash of prudence drove me on to speak. “Do you remember when I talked to you last?” She answered with the detachment of a witness under compulsion to tell the truth. The personal was as far as possible eliminated from her voice. “Perfectly.” “We—we seemed to—to break off in the middle of a conversation.” “Which you never gave me any further opportunity of going on with.” The statement took my breath away. For some seconds I could only stare at her as a truthful man stares when he hears himself given the lie direct. “Did you—did you—want to go on with it?” I managed to stammer at last. “What do you think?” “I—I didn’t think that. I waited nearly two hours.” “And if you’d only waited a few minutes more—” I leaned down toward her, breaking in on her words with a sense of what I might have lost: “Everything would have been different? You were going to say that?” She took time to raise her hands and adjust the yashmak, giving me the clue to her reason for wearing it. It was putting on a vizor before going into battle. Knowing that she would be thrown into some difficult situations, she had taken this method of being as far as possible screened against embarrassment. She was successful in that. Apart from the shifting surface fire of her eyes and the slightest possible tremor in her voice I saw no rift in the barricade of her composure. “No; that isn’t what I was going to say. I don’t know how things would have been. I suppose they would have been as—as they are now.” “But we could have talked them over.” “If you’d waited.” “I should have waited forever if I’d known.” “Or if,” she went on, with the same serenity, “you hadn’t disappeared next day without leaving an address. I tried to find you—as well as I could, that is—without seeming to hunt you down.” I explained that when I left New York on that last Monday in June, 1914, I had not expected to be gone for more than a few weeks—just the time to recover from the first effects of the blow I thought her scorn had dealt to me.