FullReads

Emotion swelled his heart and made him husky–love and patriotism, pride and hope, and a hot burst of courage.

“What if we strike a mine?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t care so much. It would give me a chance to save you.”

Overhead they were signalling the shore with a white light. Along with the new emotions that were choking him came an unaccustomed impulse of boastfulness.

“I can read that,” he said when she ignored his offer to save her. “Of course it’s code, but I can spell it out.”

He made a move to step forward and watch the signaler, but she put her hand on his arm.

“Don’t go. I’m nervous, Cecil,” she said.

She had called him by his first name. It shook him profoundly, that and the touch of her hand on his arm.

“Oh, I love you, love you!” he said hoarsely. But he did not try to take her in his arms, or attempt to caress the hand that still clung to him. He stood very erect, looking at the shadowy outline of her. Then, her long scarf blowing toward him, he took the end of it and kissed that very gravely.

“I would die for you,” he said.

Then Lethway joined them.

III

London was not kind to him. He had felt, like many Canadians, that in going to England he was going home. But England was cold.

Not the people on the streets. They liked the Canadians and they cheered them when their own regiments went by unhailed. It appealed to their rampant patriotism that these men had come from across the sea to join hands with them against common foe. But in the clubs, where his letters admitted the boy, there was a different atmosphere. Young British officers were either cool or, much worse, patronising. They were inclined to suspect that his quiet confidence was swanking. One day at luncheon he drank a glass of wine, not because he wanted it but because he did not like to refuse. The result was unfortunate. It loosened his tongue a bit, and he mentioned the medals.

Not noisily, of course. In an offhand manner, to his next neighbor. It went round the table, and a sort of icy silence, after that, greeted his small sallies. He never knew what the trouble was, but his heart was heavy in him.

And it rained.

It was always raining. He had very little money beyond his pay, and the constant hiring of taxicabs worried him. Now and then he saw some one he knew, down from Salisbury for a holiday, but they had been over long enough to know their way about. They had engagements, things to buy. He fairly ate his heart out in sheer loneliness.

There were two hours in the day that redeemed the others. One was the hour late in the afternoon when, rehearsal over, he took Edith O’Hara to tea. The other was just before he went to bed, when he wrote her the small note that reached her every morning with her breakfast.

In the seven days before he joined his regiment at Salisbury he wrote her seven notes. They were candid, boyish scrawls, not love letters at all. This was one of them:

Dear Edith: I have put in a rotten evening and am just
going to bed. I am rather worried because you looked so
tired to-day. Please don’t work too hard.

I am only writing to say how I look forward each night to
seeing you the next day. I am sending with this a small
bunch of lilies of the valley. They remind me of you.

CECIL.

The girl saved those letters. She was not in love with him, but he gave her something no one else had ever offered: a chivalrous respect that pleased as well as puzzled her.

Once in a tea shop he voiced his creed, as it pertained to her, over a plate of muffins.

“When we are both back home, Edith,” he said, “I am going to ask you something.”