“You always had genius,” he urged, gently, “and you were so beautiful.”

She shook her head mournfully.  “I was only an imitation always—­only a dresden-china imitation of the real thing I might have been, if I had been taken right in time.  I got wrong so early.  Everything I said or did was mostly imitation.  It was made up of other people’s acts and words.  I could never forget anything I’d ever heard; it drowned any real thing in me.  I never emerged—­never was myself.”

“You were a genius,” he repeated again.  “That’s what genius does.  It takes all that ever was and makes it new.”

She made a quick spasmodic protest of her hand.  She could not bear to have him praise her.  She wanted to tell him all that had ever been, all that she ought to be sorry for, was sorry for now almost beyond endurance.  She wanted to strip her soul bare before him; but she caught the look of home in his eyes, she was at his knees at peace, and what he thought of her meant so much just now—­in this one hour, for this one hour.  She had had such hard travelling, and here was a rest-place on the road.

He saw that her soul was up in battle again, but he took her arms, and held them gently, controlling her agitation.  Presently, with a great sigh, her forehead drooped upon his hands.  They were in a vast theatre of war, and they were part of it; but for the moment sheer waste of spirit and weariness of soul made peace in a turbulent heart.

“It’s her real self—­at last,” he kept saying to himself, “She had to have her chance, and she has got it.”

Outside in a dark corner of the veranda, Al’mah was in reverie.  She knew from the silence within that all was well.  The deep peace of the night, the thing that was happening in the house, gave her a moment’s surcease from her own problem, her own arid loneliness.  Her mind went back to the night when she had first sung “Manassa” at Covent Garden.  The music shimmered in her brain.  She essayed to hum some phrases of the opera which she had always loved, but her voice had no resonance or vibration.  It trailed away into a whisper.

“I can’t sing any more.  What shall I do when the war ends?  Or is it that I am to end here with the war?” she whispered to herself....  Again reverie deepened.  Her mind delivered itself up to an obsession.  “No, I am not sorry I killed him,” she said firmly after a long time, “If a price must be paid, I will pay it.”

Buried in her thoughts, she was scarcely conscious of voices near by.  At last they became insistent to her ears, They were the voices of sentries off duty—­the two who had talked to her earlier in the evening, after Ian Stafford had left.

“This ain’t half bad, this night ain’t,” said one.  “There’s a lot o’ space in a night out here.”

“I’d like to be ‘longside o’ some one I know out by ’Ampstead ’Eath,” rejoined the other.

“I got a girl in Camden Town,” said the First victoriously.