"If anything should happen," I said to Cissie Boscobel one day, "I want you to look after Hugh."
The dawn seemed to break over her, though she only said, tremulously:
"Happen—how?"
"I don't know. Perhaps nothing will. But if it does—"
She slipped away, doubtless so as not to hear more.
And then one evening, when I was not thinking especially about it, the Cloud came down on the Mountain; the voice spoke out of it, and my course was made plain.
But before that night I also had received a cablegram. It was from my sister Louise, to say that the King Arthur, her husband's ship, had been blown up in the North Sea, and that he was among the lost.
So the call was coming to me more sharply than I had yet heard it. With Lady Cecilia's example in mind, I said little to those about me beyond mentioning the fact. I suppose they showed me as much sympathy as the sweeping away of a mere brother-in-law demanded. They certainly said they were sorry, and hinted that that was what nations let themselves in for when they were so rash as to go to war.
"Think we'd ever expose our fellows like that?" was Hugh's comment. "Not on your life!"
But they didn't make a heroine of me as they did with Lady Cissie; not that I cared about that. I only hoped that the fact that my brother-in-law's name was in all the American accounts of the incident would show them that I belonged to some one, and that some one belonged to me. If it did I never perceived it. Perhaps the loss of a mere captain in the navy was a less gallant occurrence than the death in action of a Lord Leatherhead; perhaps we were already getting used to the toll of war; but, whatever the reason, Lady Cissie was still, to all appearances, the only sufferer. Within a day or two a black dress was my sole reminder that the King Arthur had gone down; and, even to Hugh, I made no further reference to the catastrophe.