"Yes," he said, with a nod of the head, "I incurred that disgrace. I shall be ashamed of it all my life. Had I been caught, it might have meant an ignoble death; in any case, it would have meant years of prison--and I should have deserved those years of prison." Millie shut her eyes in horror. Everything else that he had told her, every other incident--his sufferings, his perils--all seemed of little account beside this crowning risk, this crowning act of sacrifice. It was not merely that he had risked a shameful death or a shameful imprisonment. Millie was well aware that his whole nature and character must be in revolt against the act itself. Desertion! It implied disloyalty, untruth, deceit, cowardice--just those qualities, indeed, which she knew Tony most to hate, which perhaps she had rather despised him for hating. No man would have been more severe in the punishment of a deserter than Tony himself. Yet he had deserted, and upon her account. And he sat there telling her of it quietly, as though it were the most insignificant action in the world. He might have escaped the consequences--he would certainly not have escaped the shame. But Millie's cup of remorse was not yet full. "Yet I cannot see that I could do anything else. To-night proves to me that I was right, I think. I have come very quickly, yet I am only just in time." There was a long stain of wine upon the table-cloth beneath his eyes. There Callon had upset his glass upon Tony's entrance. "Yes, it was time that I returned," he continued. "One way or another a burden of disgrace had to be borne--if I stayed, just as certainly as if I came away; I saw that quite clearly. So I came away." He forbore to say that now the disgrace fell only upon his shoulders, that she was saved from it. But Millie understood, and in her heart she thanked him for his forbearance. "But it was hard on me, I think," he said. "You see, even now I am on French soil, and subject to French laws." And Millie, upon that, started up in alarm. "What do you mean?" she asked breathlessly. "There has been a disturbance here to-night, has there not? Suppose that the manager of this restaurant has sent for a gendarme!" With a swift movement Millie gathered up the medals and held them close in her clenched hands. "Oh, it does not need those to convict me; my name would be enough. Let my name appear and there's a deserter from the Foreign Legion laid by the heels in France. All the time we have been talking here I have sat expecting that door to open behind me." Millie caught up a lace wrap which lay upon a sofa. She had the look of a hunted creature. She spoke quickly and feverishly, in a whisper. "Oh, why did not you say this at once? Let us go!" Tony sat stubbornly in his chair. "No," said he, with his eyes fixed upon her. "I have given you an account of how I have spent the years during which we have been apart. Can you do the same?"