"Listen," she said rapidly, "if war should be declared I shall be in
the gallery to hear it. I will come straight home and shut myself up
in my boudoir--for hours--to be with you in a way--Shall I? Will--
would it mean anything to you?"

"Of course it would!"

His face was fully unmasked, and she moved abruptly to it as to a
magnet. In another moment they were in the more certain seclusion of
the vestibule, and she was in his arms. They clung together with a
passion which despair with ironic compensation made perfect, and their
first kiss which was to be their last expressed for a moment the
longing of the year of their love and of the years that were to come.
That such a moment ever could end was so incredible that when Betty
suddenly found herself alone she looked about in every direction for
him, and then the blood rushed through her in a tide of impotent fury.

It was this blind rage that enabled her to go back to the parlor and
keep up until the Carters went home a few moments later, and her
mother had gone to bed. Then she went to her boudoir and locked
herself in.

How she got through that night without sending him an imperious
summons she never knew, unless it were that she found some measure of
relief in a letter she wrote to him. If she could not see him, he was
still her lover, her only intimate friend, and her confessor. She
promised not to write again, but she demanded what help he could give
her.

She sent the letter in the morning, and he replied at once:--