"Why to-night, Dr. Anstice? Has this day been to you what it has been to me—a day of the bitterest suffering I have ever known?"
The tone of her deep voice, so oddly gentle, the compassionate expression in her usually cold blue eyes, were too much for Anstice, whose endurance was nearly at the breaking point; and he turned to her with a look in his face which dismayed her, so tragic was it.
"Mrs. Carstairs, this day I have been in—hell!" The word sounded cruelly out of place in the quiet moonlit night. "Once before I fancied I had reached the point at which a man may turn his back on life and its horrors without thinking himself a pitiful coward. I suffered then—my God, how I suffered!—but the torture I have endured to-day makes me feel as though I have never known what suffering is until now."
Her answer came quickly.
"But you know now that no man can turn his back on life and yet escape the allegation of cowardice!" It was an assertion rather than a question. "Dr. Anstice, I don't ask to know what your suffering has been—I don't want you to tell me—but one thing I do know, that you, and men like you, are not the ones who give up the battle when the fight is fiercest."
He delayed his answer so long that Chloe had time to feel curiously frightened by his silence. And when his reply came it was hardly reassuring.
"I thought you were too wise a woman to indulge in generalities, Mrs. Carstairs." His tired voice robbed the words of offence. "And don't you know that it is never safe to prophesy what a man will do in a battle? The bravest may turn coward beneath a hail of fire—the man who is afraid may perform some deed which will entitle him—and rightly—to the coveted Victoria Cross."
"Yes." She spoke steadily, her eyes on his face. "But that's the battlefield of the world, Dr. Anstice, the material, earthly battlefield. It's the battlefield of the soul I was thinking of just now; and if I may use a quotation which has been battered out of nearly all its original fine shape by careless usage, to me the truly brave man is he who remains to the end the—'captain of his soul!'"
Her voice sank on the last words; but Anstice had caught her meaning, and he turned to her with a new light in his tired eyes.
"Mrs. Carstairs, thank you for what you've just said. Captain of his soul—yes, I've heard it often enough, but never stopped to ponder its meaning. And as the captain mustn't lose his ship if mortal man can prevent the loss, so a man must bring the ship of his soul safely into port. Is that what you meant just now?"