That was the dominant note of his thoughts. What a jest the Fates had prepared for him that the very moment when the incoherencies of his life were crystallised by a great flash of truth--the very moment when he had felt the overwhelming impulse to consecrate his life in a crusade against Ignorance--that same instant should witness the snapping of the silk threads of his love! How scornful she had been--as if he were something unclean, too low a thing for her to touch! This girl, whom he had pitied for her loneliness--this woman who had ridiculed the life of England and declared that it was stifling her--had said that the glory of war was in her blood. She had called him a fool because he dared to say that carnage was wrong. He had thought her an advanced thinker; she was a reactionary of the most pronounced type. A feeling of fury whipped his pulses. Confound her and her unbridled tongue! What a fool he had been to woo her! One might as well try to coax a wild horse into submission. She would have to be conquered; she should be brought into subjugation by the stronger will of a man, for only through surrender would she achieve her own happiness. At present she resented equally the conquering of herself physically and mentally. For her own sake she must be taught the perversion of her outlook on life. And Austin Selwyn, the idealist, little thought that he was applying to Elise Durwent the same philosophy as Prussia was applying to Europe. But of one thing he was certain--much as he loved her (and at the thought his heart grew heavy with longing), his words on war had not been the idle declaimings of a sophist. There was a higher citizenship; the world was wrong to allow this war; and ignorance was the foe of mankind. He would not withdraw from that platform. Duty was not something from which a man could step lightly aside. All his writings, all his thoughts, all his half-worked-out philosophies had been but training for this great moment. And now that it had come he would not prove renegade. He would write with the language of inspiration. The agony of Man would be his spur, so that neither fatigue nor indifference could impede his labours. With the tears of the world he would pen such works that people everywhere would see the beacon-light of truth, and by it steer their troubled course. Five miles he covered in little more than an hour, and with the returning sense of strength his purpose grew in firmness.