'
But as they gathered round the fire, expecting the young gunner, she
hardly opened her lips again. Arthur Chicksands was quite conscious
that he had wounded her. She appeared to him, as she sat there in
the firelight, in all the first fairness and freshness of her youth,
as an embodied temptation. Again he said to himself that other men
might love and marry on the threshold of battle; he could not bring
himself to think it justifiable--whether for the woman or the man.
In a few weeks' time he would be back in France and in the very
thick, perhaps, of the final struggle--of its preparatory stages, at
any rate. Could one make love to a beautiful creature like that at
such a moment, and then leave her, with a whole mind?--the mind and
the nerve that were the country's due?
All the same he had never been so aware of her before. And
simultaneously his mind was invaded by the mute, haunting certainty
that her life was reaching out towards his, and that he was
repelling and hurting her.
Suddenly--into the midst of them, while Mrs.
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