"A little," he said, will finally dominant over its servant, and he was smiling as when, half stunned and in agony--and ashamed of the fact--he had risen from the débris of cloth and twisted braces. "It's all right," he concluded. She threw back her arms, her head raised, with a certain abandon as if she would bare her heart. "Lanny, there have been moments when I would have liked to fly to your arms. There have been moments when I have had the call that comes to every woman in answer to a desire. Yet I was not ready. When I really go it must be in a flame, in answer to your flame!" "You mean--I--." But if the flame were about to burst forth she smothered it in the spark. "And all this has upset me," she went on incoherently. "We've both been cruel without meaning to be, and we're in the shadow of a nightmare; and next time you come perhaps all the war talk will be over and--oh, this is enough for to-day!" She turned quickly in veritable flight and hurried toward the house. At the bend of the path she wheeled and stood facing him, a hand tossed up and opening and closing as if she had caught a shaft of sunshine and let it go again. Thus she would wave to him from the veranda as he came up the terrace steps. Indelible to him this picture, radiant of a versatile, impressionable vitality, of capacities yet unsounded, of a downright sincerity of impulses, faiths, and ideals which might buffet her this way and that over a strange course. A woman unafraid of destiny; a woman too objective yet to know herself! "If it ever comes," she called, "I'll let you know! I'll fly to you in a chariot of fire bearing my flame--I am that bold, that brazen, that reckless! For I am not an old maid yet. They've moved the age limit up to thirty. But you can't drill love into me as you drill discipline into armies--no, no more than I can argue peace into armies!" For a while, motionless, Lanstron watched the point where she had disappeared. "If I had only been a bridge-builder or an engine-driver," he thought; "anything except this beastly--" But he was wool-gathering again. He pulled himself together and started at a rapid pace for the tower, where he found Feller sitting by the table, one leg over the other easily, engaged in the prosaic business of sewing a button on his blouse. Lanstron rapped; no answer. He beat a tattoo on the casing; no answer. "Gustave!" he called; no answer. Now he entered and touched Feller's shoulder.