“Perhaps,” he said.

“You would not like to see thousands, hundreds of thousands, of men killed and maimed, would you?” she demanded, and her eyes held the horror of the sight in reality.  “You can prevent it—­you can!” Her heart was in the appeal.

“The old argument!  No, I should not like to see that,” he replied.  “I only do my duty as a soldier to my country.”

“The old answer!  The more reason why you should tell the premier you can’t!  But there is still another reason for telling him,” she urged gently.

Now he saw her not at twenty-seven but at seventeen, girlish, the subject of no processes of reason but in the spell of an intuition, and he knew that something out of the blue in a flash was coming.

“For you will not win!” she declared.

This struck fire.  Square jaw and sturdy body, in masculine energy, resolute and trained, were set indomitably against feminine vitality.

“Yes, we shall win!  We shall win!” he said without even the physical demonstration of a gesture and in a hard, even voice which was like that of the machinery of modern war itself, a voice which the aristocratic sniff, the Louis XVI. curls, or any of the old gallery-display heroes would have thought utterly lacking in histrionics suitable to the occasion.  He remained rigid after he had spoken, handsome, self-possessed.

There was no use of beating feminine fists against such a stone wall.  The force of the male was supreme.  She smiled with a strange, quivering loosening of the lips.  She spread out her hands with fingers apart, as if to let something run free from them into the air, and the flame of appeal that had been in her eyes broke into many lights that seemed to scatter into space, yet ready to return at her command.  She glanced at the clock and rose, almost abruptly.

“I was very strenuous riding my hobby against yours, wasn’t I?” she exclaimed in a flutter of distraction that made it easy for him to descend from his own steed.  “I stated a feeling.  I made a guess, a threat about your winning—­and all in the air.  That’s a woman’s privilege; one men grant, isn’t it?”

“We enjoy doing so,” he replied, all urbanity.

“Thank you!” she said simply.  “I must be at home in time for the children’s lesson on Sunday.  My sleeper is engaged, and if I am not to miss the train I must go immediately.”

With an undeniable shock of regret he realized that the interview was over.  Really, he had had a very good time; not only that, but—.

“Will it be ten years before we meet again?” he asked.

“Perhaps, unless you change the rules about officers dossing the frontier to take tea,” she replied.

“Even if I did, the vice-chief of staff might hardly go.”

“Then perhaps you must wait,” she warned him, “until the teachers of peace have done away with all frontiers.”

“Or, if there were war, I should come!” he answered in kind.  He half wished that this might start another argument and she would miss her train.  But she made no reply.  “And you may come to the Gray capital again.  You are not through travelling!” he added.