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Rh He sat up and faced Elizabeth. "Look here," he said. "Listen." And she looked and listened as he bade her. "You and I have climbed up the same hills, descended into the same valleys, come through the same fires to arrive at this particular spot;" he tapped the ground beneath his hand. "No wonder we understand each other intuitively."

Elizabeth had become aware now that Vincent was in earnest—very much in earnest. She tried, by turning away, to conceal the slow faint color that spread over her face.

"You're surprised," he murmured. "I'm sorry. I'd thought—I'd hoped that you too had recognized—had felt the kinship—which I—I— Time is so limited," he broke off, with an obvious effort to steady his now wavering voice, "with a man under military orders that he's forced to hurry all sorts of things that ought to be accomplished gradually."

Elizabeth made no direct reply to Vincent—not just then. Instead she commented upon the peculiar call of a bird in the nearby woods.

It was later when they were walking back together to the hotel in the valley, that she said casually, "I made a vow to myself when this war began that I'd never drift into caring for any man, whom I might have to lose in it."