I hesitated how to answer, but perhaps my silence spoke as clearly as words. "Don't look as if you'd just lost your last friend, my poor child," Tony said, in his good, warm way. "You haven't lost me, you know, though I've lost you. And you needn't look so guilty, either, as if you'd murdered me and buried me under the leaves! I was always expecting this thing to come, though I didn't foresee the way of it. If ever I felt tempted to believe our engagement was getting to be the real thing, why, I said to myself, 'Wait till she sees March again before you begin to be cocksure, my man.' Well, now you've seen him. And I guess you've seen in the same minute that our experiment has failed."

"I'm—afraid that's true, Tony!" I sighed. "I can't help it! It wouldn't be fair to you for us to go on as we are. I shall have to break my word to you, if I'm to be faithful to myself."

"You won't be breaking any old word!" he said. "It was never an iron-clad promise. I teased you till you agreed to try how the thing would work. It's been my fault all through, and now I'll take my medicine. Our engagement was never insured against war risks, and when I get back my senses I'm going to be glad you saw March before it was too late. I—brought you two together, sort of inadvertently, as you might say, didn't I? But, honest Injun, Peggy, I'd do the thing over again, knowing all I know. I only wish—yes, before the Lord I do wish—that good may come of it to you both."

"You're an angel, Tony, a real angel!" I almost sobbed. "But you needn't think that anything will 'come of it' in the way you mean, because it won't. I don't delude myself. I don't even hope. All the same, I must be true—to my own heart. And I beg of you to forgive me because I didn't know it well enough before."

"There isn't any question of forgiveness," said he, with his head up, and his nice Billiken face very pink. "I bless you—bless you for all you've been or done to me. And I wouldn't forget or undo anything if I could, you can bet your life on that. I think I could bear the whole business like a man, if I could stay right here and see you through. But—there's mater and Milly to think of—and the regiment. And—and—oh, well, life's just one damn thing after another!"

Mrs. Dalziel and Milly came and pleaded with me after that, and tried to frighten me into going with them; but, as Milly burst out desperately at last, I was "as hard as nails." Tony had told them nothing, I found, about the failure of our experiment or the identity of Monsieur Mars. I well understood why, and was grateful—grateful for that and for many things; most of all for bringing me to Belgium, and neither grudging nor regretting what he had done. So, as a lover, Tony went out of my life; but as a friend, he never can go.

I had no time to cry or feel lonely, or tell myself what a beast I'd been, after the three had reluctantly left me to my fate; for when I went back on duty after the good-byes, it was to find that I had been sent for to hasten to the principal ward. Monsieur Mars was being delirious in English, and the doctors and nurses understood too little of the language to know whether he were merely babbling or pouring forth important information.

There Eagle lay in his narrow, white bed, clean and pale, with his head swathed in bandages, a very different man from the grimy, bloodstained vision that had flashed on me a few hours before. The merest stranger who had ever seen Captain March would have deserved no credit for recognizing him now.

The nurses waited eagerly for me to translate his mutterings; but he only mumbled again and again, "It's all over, all over!"

If I could guess at a sad hidden meaning for the words, it was one which need not be handed on to others; and I proved so broken a reed as a translator that I expected to receive marching orders, right-about face. Strange to say, however, though his eyes were half closed and he seemed to see nothing, know nothing that went on around him, after I had spoken in a low tone to his nurse Eagle stopped muttering. For a moment he appeared to listen, and then with a deep sigh as if of relief from pain or some heavy anxiety, the half-open eyelids closed. The slight frown which had drawn his brows together slowly faded away. He had the air of being at rest.