"Varsieff," I said a moment later. "Yes----" "I've got to tell you something----" He turned quickly. "Paula Mantone is near----" "No!" "I saw her last night." "Will she see me?" I laughed at him. "Do you think she would want to see you now?... You're a sick man, Varsieff--morally sick. Any decision is better than your present incapacity.... I think she must have sensed your weakness--that she came to bring you strength, for she is your strength." "Does she love me?" he asked. "That's a slap in her face to ask that--a woman who gives you her soul's strength--the love of her life. That's lack of faith, my friend----" "I am whipped. The white-haired boys--they want to go home----" "You can't wash your hands. You can't say, 'Go home, boys.' They have to fight their way home. First, they have to fight their way to the east out of this valley--against old Russia!... It's the first great battle of the Old and New--first time in the history of the world. We hold the New for better or worse--this little Theban band. You would let us fail and dribble away and slink into the Marshes--you, her lover, whom she calls Boy and Strongheart----" * * * * * "What did she say?" he asked fiercely. "----that I need not speak of her coming unless you needed help. She said you would not need help on account of your own lack of courage--rather that it would be your great tenderness that might defeat our Cause now. She said this was but a last ordeal, hardest of all for Builders, who have ceased to kill...." "Where did you see her?" It was all a lie, of course, except I had dreamed of her coming. I invented a place of meeting and added to his question that Sedgwick did not know of her presence. "I agreed that we were not killers, but I told her that we dared to be cruel to ourselves," I added. "What did she say to that?" Varsieff asked hoarsely. He had suddenly become like a child--one who dared not go to her, who scarcely trusted himself to speak. "She said _that_ was the key to the whole matter--that we dare to sacrifice ourselves--dare to inflict pain upon each other because one's true love is the self--" I was startled and awed at my own words. The idea was unlike anything of mine. It was exactly as if she had told me something of the kind in the dream. Varsieff groaned: "The glory of her," he whispered. "Was there more?" "Only that you must not falter now ... and that she would be waiting for you at the end of the day----" "'In the cool of the evening,' she would say," he muttered. "Perhaps that was it," I said. "Nothing more?" "Yes--but only if you needed it----" "I do." "That she never loved you so well as now--that you mean new Russia to her--that she will come running to you in the cool of the evening--either here or _on the other side_--and something about the child of a king."