"I--I fancy--I--I guess I--I--am," she faltered. "O God!" he groaned, "why did you come out?" He rose, lifted her elbow, murmured something to the guests. He would have supported her to the door, but she pleaded: "Don't! They'll think it's too much ch-ch-champagne. I'm all right!" She made the door in excellent control, but it cost her her last cent of strength. Outside, she would have fallen, but he huddled her in his arms, lifted her, carried her to his car. He piled robes on her, but those riveters inside her threatened to pound her to death. Burning pains gnawed her chest like cross-cut saws. When the car stopped she was not in front of her cottage, but before the hospital. When the doctor finished his inspection she heard him mumble to Davidge: "Pneumonia! Double pneumonia!" CHAPTER IX Once more Mamise had come between Davidge and his work. He did not care what happened to his ships or his shipyard. He watched Mamise fighting for life, if indeed she fought, for he could not get to her through the fog. She was often delirious and imagined herself back in her cruel times. He learned a few things about that mystic period she would never disclose. And he was glad that she had never told him more. He fled from her, for eavesdropping on a delirium has something of the contemptible quality of peeping at a nakedness. He supposed that Mamise would die. All the poor women with pasts that he had read about, in what few novels he had read, had died or it had been found out that they had magically retained their innocence through years of evil environment. He supposed also that Mamise would die, because that was the one thing needful to make his life a perfect failure. He had not gone to war, yet he had lost his arm. He had never really desperately loved before, and now he would lose his heart. It was just as well, because if Mamise lived he would lose her, anyway. He would not tie her to the crippled thing he was. While the battalions of disease ravaged the poor Belgium of Mamise's body the world outside went on making history. The German Empire kept caving in on all sides. Her armies held nowhere. Her only pride was in saving a defeat from being a disaster. Her confederates were disintegrating. The newspapers mentioned now, not cities that surrendered to the Allies, but nations. And at last Germany added one more to her unforgivable assaults upon the patience of mankind. Just as the Allies poised for the last tremendous all-satisfying _coup de grâce_ the Empire put up her hands and whined the word that had become the world-wide synonym for poltroonery, "_Kamerad!_"