“I know it. I know what I ask when I ask your help.”
She said in the ghost of a voice: “If I turn against _them_—they will kill me.”
“No,” she burst out in an agonised voice, “it is not in God’s hands! If it were, I should not be afraid! It is in the hands of those who stole my soul!”
She covered her face with both arms, fairly writhing on her chair.
“If the Yezidees have actually made you believe any such nonsense”—he began; but she dropped her arms and stared at him out of terrible blue eyes:
“I don’t want to die, I tell you! I am afraid!—_afraid_! If I reveal to you what I know they’ll kill me. If I turn against them and aid you, they’ll slay my body, and send it after my soul!”
She was trembling so violently that he sprang up and went to her. After a moment he passed one arm around her shoulders and held her firmly, close to him.
“Come,” he said, “do your duty. Those who enlist under the banner of Christ have nothing to dread in this world or the next.”
“If—if I could believe I were safe there.”
“I tell you that you are. So is every human soul! What mad nonsense have the Yezidees made you believe? Is there any surer salvation for the soul than to die in Christ’s service?”
He slipped his arm from her quivering shoulders and grasped both her hands, crushing them as though to steady every fibre in her tortured body.
“I want you to live. I want to live, too. But I tell you it’s in God’s hands, and we soldiers of civilisation have nothing to fear except failure to do our duty. Now, then, are we comrades under the United States Government?”
Perhaps she felt the physical pain of his crushing grip for she turned and looked him in the eyes.
“I don’t want to die,” she whispered. “Don’t make me!”
The terrible directness of her child’s gaze became almost unendurable to him.
“Will you offer your country your soul and body?” he insisted in a low, tense voice.
For a moment she rested against his shoulder, deathly white, then in a flash she had straightened, was on her feet in one bound and so swiftly that he scarcely followed her movement—was unaware that she had risen until he saw her standing there with a pistol glittering in her hand, her eyes fixed on the portières that hung across the corridor leading to his bedroom.