Michael was silent for a moment. Then he turned a quiet, radiant face to her.

"I can't talk about it," he said. "I can't get accustomed to the wonder of it."

"That will do. That's a completely satisfactory account. But go on."

Michael laughed.

"How can I?" he asked. "There's no end and no beginning. I can't 'go on'

as you order me about a thing like that. There is Sylvia; there is me."

"I must be content with that, then," she said, smiling.

"We are," said Michael.

Lady Barbara waited a moment without speaking.

"And your mother?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"She still refuses to see me," he said. "She still thinks it was I who made the plot to take her away and shut her up. She is often angry with me, poor darling, but--but you see it isn't she who is angry: it's just her malady."

"Yes, my dear," said Lady Barbara. "I am so glad you see it like that."

"How else could I see it? It was my real mother whom I began to know last Christmas, and whom I was with in town for the three months that followed. That's how I think of her: I can't think of her as anything else."

"And how is she otherwise?"

Again he shook his head.

"She is wretched, though they say that all she feels is dim and veiled, that we mustn't think of her as actually unhappy. Sometimes there are good days, when she takes a certain pleasure in her walks and in looking after a little plot of ground where she gardens. And, thank G.o.d, that sudden outburst when she tried to kill me seems to have entirely pa.s.sed from her mind. They don't think she remembers it at all. But then the good days are rare, and are growing rarer, and often now she sits doing nothing at all but crying."

Aunt Barbara laid her hand on him.

"Oh, my dear," she said.

Michael paused for a moment, his brown eyes shining.

"If only she could come back just for a little to what she was in January," he said. "She was happier then, I think, than she ever was before. I can't help wondering if anyhow I could have prolonged those days, by giving myself up to her more completely."

"My dear, you needn't wonder about that," said Aunt Barbara. "Sir James told me that it was your love and nothing else at all that gave her those days."

Michael's lips quivered.

"I can't tell you what they were to me," he said, "for she and I found each other then, and we both felt we had missed each other so much and so long. She was happy then, and I, too. And now everything has been taken from her, and still, in spite of that, my cup is full to overflowing."

"That's how she would have it, Michael," said Barbara.

"Yes, I know that. I remind myself of that."

Again he paused.

"They don't think she will live very long," he said. "She is getting physically much weaker. But during this last week or two she has been less unhappy, they think. They say some new change may come any time: it may be only the great change--I mean her death; but it is possible before that that her mind will clear again. Sir James told me that occasionally happened, like--like a ray of sunlight after a stormy day.

It would be good if that happened. I would give almost anything to feel that she and I were together again, as we were."

Barbara, childless, felt something of motherhood. Michael's simplicity and his sincerity were already known to her, but she had never yet known the strength of him. You could lean on Michael. In his quiet, undemonstrative way he supported you completely, as a son should; there was no possibility of insecurity. . . .

"G.o.d bless you, my dear," she said.

CHAPTER XIII

One close thundery morning about a week later, Michael was sitting at his piano in his shirtsleeves, busy practising. He was aware that at the other end of the room the telephone was calling for him, but it seemed to be of far greater importance at the minute to finish the last page of one of the Bach fugues, than to attend to what anybody else might have to say to him. Then it suddenly flashed across him that it might be Sylvia who wanted to speak to him, or that there might be news about his mother, and his fingers leaped from the piano in the middle of a bar, and he ran and slid across the parquet floor.

But it was neither of these, and compared to them it was a case of "only" Hermann who wanted to see him. But Hermann, it appeared, wanted to see him urgently, and, if he was in (which he was) would be with him in ten minutes.

But the Bach thread was broken, and Michael, since it was not worth while trying to mend it for the sake of these few minutes, sat down by the open window, and idly took up the morning paper, which as yet he had not opened, since he had hurried over breakfast in order to get to his piano. The music announcements on the outside page first detained him, and seeing that the concert by the Falbes, which was to take place in five or six days, was advertised, he wondered vaguely whether it was about that that Hermann wanted to see him, and, if so, why he could not have said whatever he had to say on the telephone, instead of cutting things short with the curt statement that he wished to see him urgently, and would come round at once. Then remembering that Francis had been playing cricket for the Guards yesterday, he turned briskly over to the last page of sporting news, and found that his cousin had distinguished himself by making no runs at all, but by missing two expensive catches in the deep field. From there, after a slight inspection of a couple of advertis.e.m.e.nt columns, he worked back to the middle leaf, where were leaders and the news of nations and the movements of kings. All this last week he had scanned such items with a growing sense of amus.e.m.e.nt in the recollection of Hermann's disquiet over the Sarajevo murders, and Aunt Barbara's more detailed and vivid prognostications of coming danger, for nothing more had happened, and he supposed--vaguely only, since the affair had begun to fade from his mind--that Austria had made inquiries, and that since she was satisfied there was no public p.r.o.nouncement to be made.

The hot breeze from the window made the paper a little unmanageable for a moment, but presently he got it satisfactorily folded, and a big black headline met his eye. A half-column below it contained the demands which Austria had made in the Note addressed to the Servian Government.

A glance was sufficient to show that they were framed in the most truculent and threatening manner possible to imagine. They were not the reasonable proposals that one State had a perfect right to make of another on whose soil and with the connivance of whose subjects the murders had been committed; they were a piece of arbitrary dictation, a threat levelled against a dependent and an inferior.

Michael had read them through twice with a growing sense of uneasiness at the thought of how Lady Barbara's first antic.i.p.ations had been fulfilled, when Hermann came in. He pointed to the paper Michael held.

"Ah, you have seen it," he said. "Perhaps you can guess what I wanted to see you about."

"Connected with the Austrian Note?" asked Michael.

"Yes."

"I have not the vaguest idea."

Hermann sat down on the arm of his chair.

"Mike, I'm going back to Germany to-day," he said. "Now do you understand? I'm German."

"You mean that Germany is at the back of this?"

"It is obvious, isn't it? Those demands couldn't have been made without the consent of Austria's ally. And they won't be granted. Servia will appeal to Russia. And . . . and then G.o.d knows what may happen. In the event of that happening, I must be in my Fatherland ready to serve, if necessary."

"You mean you think it possible you will go to war with Russia?" asked Michael.

"Yes, I think it possible, and, if I am right, if there is that possibility, I can't be away from my country."

"But the Emperor, the fire-engine whom you said would quench any conflagration?"

"He is away yachting. He went off after the visit of the British fleet to Kiel. Who knows whether before he gets back, things may have gone too far? Can't you see that I must go? Wouldn't you go if you were me?

Suppose you were in Germany now, wouldn't you hurry home?"