“I’m afraid you’ll think me captious if I say that nothing could do it.  If you weren’t happy, I couldn’t be; and you’d never be happy except as a soldier.”

“That trade would be open to me whatever happened.”

“In theory, yes; but in practice, if you had a wife who was under a cloud you’d have to go under it, too.  That’s what it would come to in the working-out.”

She stood up from sheer inability to continue sitting still.  The piece of embroidery fell on the grass.  Ashley smiled at her—­a smile that was not wholly forced, because of the thoughts with which she inspired him.  Her poise, her courage, the something in her that would have been pride if it had not been nearer to meekness and which he had scarcely called meekness before he felt it to be fortitude, gave him confidence in the future.  “She’s stunning—­by Jove!” It seemed to him that he saw her for the first time.  For the first time since he had known her he was less the ambitious military officer seeking a wife who would grace a high position than he was a man in love with a woman.  Separating these two elements within himself, he was able to value her qualities, not as adornments to some Home or Colonial Headquarters House, but as of supreme worth for their own sake.  “People have only got to see her,” he said, inwardly, to which he added aloud: 

“I dare say the cloud may not be so threatening, after all; and even if it is, I should go under it with the pluckiest woman in the world.”

She acknowledged this with a scarcely visible smile and a slight inclination of the head.  “Thank you; I’m foolish enough to like to hear you say it.  I think I am plucky—­alone.  But I shouldn’t be if I involved anybody else.”

“But if it was some one who could help you?”

“That might be different, but I don’t know of any one who could. You couldn’t.  If you tried you’d only injure yourself without doing me any good.”

“At the least, I could take you away from—­from all this.”

“No, because it’s the sort of thing one can never leave behind.  It’s gone ahead of us.  It will meet us at every turn.  You and I—­and papa—­are probably by to-day a subject for gossip in half the clubs in New York.  To-morrow it will be the same thing in London—­at the club you call the Rag—­and the Naval and Military—­and your different Service clubs—­”

To hide the renewal of his dismay he pooh-poohed this possibility.  “As a mere nine days’ wonder.”

“Which isn’t forgotten when the nine days are past.  Long after they’ve ceased speaking of it they’ll remember—­”

“They’ll remember,” he interrupted, fiercely, “that I jilted you.”

She colored hotly.  “That you—­what?”

He colored, too.  The words were as much a surprise to him as to her.  He had never thought of this view of the case till she herself summoned up the vision of his friends and enemies discussing the affair in big leather arm-chairs in big, ponderous rooms in Piccadilly or St. James’s Square.  It was what they would say, of course.  It was what he himself would have said of any one else.  He had a renewed feeling that retreat was cut off.