hopeless." "Look here," I said.

"You mustn't take things so hard.

You go up and down....

Your emotions...." But he only shook his head: "She shouldn't have said it--like that--before every one," he repeated.
I left him.

Afterwards as I stood in the passage, white and ghostly in the moonlight, something suddenly told me that this night the prologue of our drama was concluded.
I waited on the steps of the house, heard the laughing voices in the distance, while over the rest of the world there was absolute silence; then abruptly, quite sharply, across the long low fields there came the rumble of cannon.