I arranged for Doctor Murchison, a man I knew at Neuilly, to go over and make a thorough examination, cautioning him about dispelling illusions. His report, as I feared, leaves little hope; the lungs are badly affected. It can be only a question of time.

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Ben went off to-night.

III

At last her letter! It was waiting for me on the little table in the hall, among the mail from home. I went up the stairs breathlessly, without waiting for the elevator, and shutting myself in, read it again and again.

Mon ami:

I have waited a whole week since receiving your letter, for I wanted time to think, to think calmly and deliberately. It was wrong for me to leave the decision to you, as I did. I alone must bear the responsibility, for I alone know all the facts, don’t you see? I shall write you, as I promised, and as my heart would have it,—until God brings you safely through this war.

David, I do this with many misgivings, and my doubts will always be with me. If, some later day, in your spirit, you may reproach me and wonder at my lack of courage (some day, mon ami, you will do so, and that will be my punishment) remember this, that I should never have weakened as I have done, if it were not that you are going again into this hideous war. All that I have told myself this long week, all my arguments, are as nothing when I say to myself that death will be your companion by day and by night. Even if some day you should blame me in the bitterness of your heart, I can do no otherwise,—no woman could. I do not matter,—you ask for my strength. It is yours.

And now, mon ami, only one thing can justify the decision I have made, freely and not impulsively; the feeling that if God in some mysterious way has willed that I should come into your life, that it is not to weaken you, not to sadden you, but to give you strength and courage and that for knowing all the faith I have in you, you will rise to the big things.

I have such a high ideal for you, mon ami. I know your strength and I know what you need. I feel about you a certain weakness—perhaps weakness is too strong a word—a certain longing for what a woman, a real woman, can give to you. You do not speak what is in your heart easily,—never to friends. It is through another that you will discover yourself. Some men are sufficient to themselves and, if they do not know the greatest happiness—for women seldom love them—they are saved from much sorrow. You are not like that, David. You are sensitive to every impression and you need happiness really to find all the qualities of the heart that are waiting to be called forth. I could not bear the thought of your marrying the wrong woman.

For you are not meant to go through this world alone. It may seem strange, incomprehensible to you, that I can hold you so dear and yet look forward with such hope to your marrying some lovely young girl, like Anne Brinsmade, to complete your life. Yet it is so. It is the maternal in me, mon ami, that you always appeal to, David, since I have no right to the other. Let me then be in your life all that means hope and faith and ambition, during this period of trial, and if you wish to make me feel some little happiness in what I do, let me know that nothing I have done will ever weaken your courage or prevent your seeking the happiness to which every man has a right. Let us keep then a nobility of spirit, mon ami, and without rebellion or sadness, face life as God in his fuller knowledge has willed to prove us.

B.

When I had read this through the first time—tumultuously—seeking to absorb it in one breath, I read it through again, slowly, stopping at every sentence, sometimes with every sense thrilling, sometimes with a black revolt against the obstinate struggle for a repression that I knew was not in her heart. I searched every phrase for a significance that might be concealed beneath the words, alternately high with hope and again given over to despair. When I had read her letter for the fifth time, I laid it on my lap and abandoned myself to my thoughts. It had become so dark in my little bedroom that I could no longer distinguish her handwriting. Outside, over the young green of the trees, past the fading foliage of the Champs Elysées, the golden dome of the Invalides was paling in the sifting in of the dust. It is the hour of all the day to which I am most sensitive, the hour, when shared, which brings a tenderness to the heart that raises us triumphant above the riot of the city, but an hour, when faced alone, that oppresses the imagination and weighs it down with the futility of hoping against the inevitable, when memories of vanished happiness are too acute and separation intolerable.

I rose hurriedly, lit my candle and drew the curtains. How many emotions thronged into my heart as I sat down at my table and turned her letter in my hands; the soft blue paper, with the thin and rounded handwriting, that was all Bernoline,—order, discipline and delicacy. My first impulse was to take up the chronicle of my days and write to her while the mood was strong. I remained an hour staring at an empty page, unable to phrase a thought. And, even now, what is in my mind? There are moments when I face the truth without wavering, and tell myself that her instinct is right, that there is no outcome possible for me, that I am wilfully, blindly plunging ahead into an entanglement which will wreck my whole life; that I am wrong in overcoming her determination and forcing a situation which is against her intuitions,—and where, of course, she must suffer as much as I shall. For in her tradition there is no escape even from the most hideous of marriages.

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