She nodded, smiling.  Smiles were rare with her, now.  She had grown sober and serious, in these years of work and battle and stern endeavor.  The Catherine Flint of the old times had vanished—­the Catherine of country club days, and golf and tennis, and the opera—­the Catherine of Newport, of the horse show, of Paris, of “society.”  In her place now lived another and a nobler woman, a woman known and loved the length and breadth of the land, a woman exalted and strengthened by new, high and splendid race-aspirations; by a vision of supernal beauty—­the vision of the world for the workers, each for all and all for each!

She had grown more mature and beautiful, with the passing years.  No mark of time had yet laid its hand upon her face or figure.  Young, still—­she was now but five-and-twenty, and Gabriel only twenty-eight—­she walked like a goddess, lithe, strong and filled with overflowing vigor.  Her eyes glowed with noble enthusiasms; and every thought, every impulse and endeavor now was upward, onward, filled with stimulus and hope and courage.

Thus, a braver, broader and more splendid woman than Gabriel had known in the other days of his first love for her—­the days when he had wished her penniless, the days when her prospective millions stood between them—­she walked beside him now.  And they two, comrades, understood each other; spoke the same language, shared the same aspirations, dreamed the same wondrous dreams.  Their smile, as their eyes met, was in itself a benediction and a warm caress.

“Charge the forts!” Gabriel repeated.  “Yes, Kate, the battle still goes on, no matter what happens.  Here and there, soldiers fall and die.  Even battalions perish; but the war continues.  When I think of all the fights you’ve been in, since I was put away, I’m unspeakably envious.  You’ve been through the Tawana Valley strike, the big Consolidated Western lockout and the Imperial Mills massacre.  You were a delegate to the 1923 Revolution Congress, in Berlin, and saw the slaughter in Unter den Linden—­helped nurse the wounded comrades, inside the Treptow Park barricades.  Then, out in California—­”

She checked him, with a hand on his arm.

“Please don’t, Gabriel,” she entreated.  “What I have done has been so little, so terribly, pitiably little, compared to what needs to be done!  And then remember, too, that in and through all, this thought has run, like the red thread through every cable of the British navy—­the thought that in my every activity, I am working against my own father, combatting him, being as it were a traitor and—­”

“Traitor?” exclaimed the man.  “Never!  The bond between you two is forever broken.  You recognize in him, now, an enemy of all mankind.  Waldron is another.  So is every one of the Air Trust group—­that is to say, the small handful of men who today own the whole world and everything in it.

“Your father, as President of that world-corporation which potentially controls two thousand millions of human beings—­and which will, tomorrow, absolutely control them, is no longer any father of yours.