The Girl Philippa

He remained silent; they walked on for a while, turned, and retraced their steps along the border of clove pinks.

"Have you gone over all your papers?" he asked in a hesitating voice.

"Yes."

"Is there anything I can do to help you – advise – aid – "

She turned almost impatiently:

"Always you are thinking of my well-being, my worldly benefit. It is for that you give me your companionship, your protection. I – I don't know – sometimes I think I have never been – so – lonely – "

Her voice broke; she turned sharply from him and stood with slender hands clenched in the starlight.

"Philippa?" he said gently, in his kindly, even voice. And it seemed to break the barrier to her reserve.

"Oh!" she faltered. " – It is something else a woman – hopes for – something different – when her heart – is empty – "

He dared not understand her, dared not touch her. He heard himself saying: "There is nobody but you, Philippa," and dared not speak – dared not say what he should have said before either he or she had learned who she really was.

Perhaps a faint idea of what held him to an aloofness, a formality unaccustomed, occurred to her during the strained silence. Perhaps she divined, vaguely, what might be in his mind.

After a while she turned, not looking at him, and took his arm! It was the first time she had done so since that day when he painted her.

Even yet she could scarcely realize, scarcely comprehend the great change which had come to her. She knew it was true; she understood that it must be the truth – that she was no longer nameless – not the foundling, not the lonely child of chance who had looked out blankly over the world, without aim, without interest, having nothing to expect, nothing to hope for from a world which had not even bestowed upon her a name.

And now – now, suddenly hazard had snatched aside that impenetrable curtain which, as long as she could remember, had hung between her and all that she desired most passionately to know.

From the loose, half palsied lips of a murderer had fallen the words she had never expected to hear. He had gone to his death, shambling, doddering, mumbling to himself. But the papers which had belonged to him had confirmed every word he uttered.

She knew now who she was, Philippa de Châtillon. She knew how her mother had died; and her father.

As yet, the wonderment of it all had not been too deeply embittered by the tragedy. It was still only wonder, and a striving to realize – a dream, strange, terrible, beautiful by turns; but still a dream to her.

Something far more real, more vivid, more vital, possessed her. She knew it; felt it always now. The consciousness of it shared with her the veiled emotions which the solving of her life's mystery evoked.

As she stood there in the brilliant starlight, both arms wound around one of his in the old, unconscious way, Halkett came into the garden, walking swiftly:

"The car is here. Don't come to the door. I had rather say good-by and God bless you here in this garden – where I first knew you, Philippa – where you and I became friends, Warner… So – good-by. If I come out of it, I'll come to you – to both of you, I hope."

"Yes," said Philippa calmly.

He took her hand, held it, looked at Warner, and took the hand he offered.

"Good-by!"

"Good-by!"

He turned and walked swiftly into the house. As he passed the stairway, he saw Sister Eila standing there as white as death.

They looked at each other in silence; she laid one hand on the banisters as though to steady herself. With the other she held out to him a flower.

When he had gone with his flower, and when the whir of his motor car had died away in that silent house, she turned to ascend the stairs again, stumbled, dropped by the rail, and lay there huddled in a heap, both hands pressed desperately over her quivering face.

Then in the room above, the sick man groaned; and she straightened up and rose as though a trumpet had sounded. And slowly, steadily, she mounted her Calvary, drying her eyes naïvely and like a little girl who has been hurt and whose grief seems hopeless, inconsolable, and never ending.

Slowly, side by side, his arm once more in her possession, Warner and Philippa returned to the Château.

When they reached the terrace, the stars overhead had become magnificent; millions and millions of them sparkled up there, arching the dark earth with necklaces of light.

He turned and gazed out over the panorama of the night. Far in the east the silver pencil of a searchlight swept the heavens.

Into the mysterious east he stared in silence, thinking of Wildresse.

The Orient had hatched out Wildresse; Biribi had caught him; Biribi had utterly extinguished his race at last.

The mysterious irony of it – the death of this man's only son – the fate that had delivered the father into the crime-blotched hands of that terrible battalion – the hazard of Asticot's discovery in the safe – the sudden, dramatic unmasking of Cassilis – could these things be happening in this year of 1914?

Stranger things than these were happening, and he knew it.

Westward the spray of a grey sea dripped from the muzzles of a thousand guns.

Eastward the coldly logical strategy of a great commander was developing, and the first fierce drive at Alsace-Lorraine was being launched.

From farther eastward still the two allies, listening, caught already the low growling of the Russian bear.

Germany, poised high above the glare of battle, waiting to snatch up, one by one, heroic and dying nations to her bosom – Germany clutching the dripping sword of conquest, heard also the rumbling of the Asiatic monster behind the Caucasus.

She turned her armed head and stared over her mailed shoulder toward the east, haughty, incredulous, magnificently barbaric – the last of the Valkyries left amid the dying gods of old, standing there alone, glittering, motionless amid the hellish conflagration of the Götterdämmerung.

Warner looked up at the stars.

The glimmering writing on Heaven's wall was plain to read.

Plainer, it seemed, than his own heart, which had grown heavy as he stood there beside the woman to whom it was now too late to speak.

For he should have spoken before, long ago, almost in the beginning. Because he had always loved her. He had known it for days, now; and yet with that blind delay and distrust of self to which some men are fated, he had waited too long to ask of her what his heart had so long, so blindly desired.

Now it was too late: He should have spoken before.

He should have spoken when she was lonely, friendless, nameless.

Now it was too late.

He turned toward the house, but she did not move, they came face to face under the high stars.

"Can't you – love me?" she faltered.

"Philippa! – "