They felt they must climb, a bit of suffocation in their hearts. Until
to-day there had been invariable stimulus for Mowbray in the age of
all things, even in the dusty, narrow, lower streets, but his smiling,
easy countenance was a lie that he disliked now. It pinched him
cruelly to leave her, and there was small amelioration in anything
that the war might bring. She would give him sympathy and zeal and
honor for the work and through all the lonely days, but what a lack
would be of that swift directness of purpose, the deeper seeing, the
glad capacity for higher heroism which he had found only in her
presence. They crossed the riverward corner of the Square, where they
had met. He tried to tell her how she had seemed that first day.

"I cannot understand," she replied. "Especially that day when I first
saw you, I had nothing."

Now they ascended the terraces that commanded the Vistula. The rocky
turf of the footpath, smoothed by the tread of forgotten generations
(but still whispering to her of those who had passed on); the
crumbling masonry of the retaining walls, gray with the pallor of the
years; and afar the curving, dust-swept farmlands, which had mothered
a thousand harvests, now moved with strange planting of peasant-
soldiers. Mobilization business everywhere, drilling of the half-
equipped, a singing excitement of parting, recruiting--no time for the
actual misery.

They stood in the very frown of the fortress at sunset. A column of
raw infantry came swinging out and started the descent. A moment
afterward the roar of a folk-song came up in a gust. It was as if the
underworld suddenly had been cratered.