“‘The danger is infinitesimal, as I told you before,’ he says, impatiently; ‘and even if it were greater than it is—well, life is a good thing, very good, but there are better things, and even if I come to grief, which is most unlikely, there are plenty of men as good as—better than—I, to step into my place.’
“‘It will be small consolation to the people who are fond of you that some one better than you is alive, though you are dead,’ I say, tearfully.
“‘But I do not mean to be dead,’ he says, with a cheery laugh. ‘Why are you so determined on killing me? I mean to live to be an admiral. Why should not I?’
“‘Why indeed?’ say I, with a feeble echo of his cheerful mirth, and feeling rather ashamed of my tears.
“‘And meanwhile you will write?’ he says with an eager return to the charge; ‘and soon? Do not look angry and pouting, as you did just now, but I must go! What is there to hinder me? I am getting up my strength as fast as it is possible for any human creature to do, and just think how I should feel if they were to come in for something really good while I am away.’
“So I wrote.
CHAPTER III.
“I often wished afterwards that my right hand had been cut off before its fingers had held the pen that wrote that letter. You wonder to see me moved at what happened so long ago—before your parents were born—and certainly it makes not much difference now; for even if he had prospered then, and come happily home to me, yet, in the course of nature he would have gone long before now. I should not have been so cruel as to have wished him to have lasted to be as I am. I did not mean to hint at the end of my story before I have reached the middle. Well—and so he went, with the letter in his pocket, and I felt something like the king in the tale, who sent a messenger with a letter, and wrote in the letter, ‘Slay the bearer of this as soon as he arrives!’ But before he went—the evening before, as we walked in the garden after supper, with our monstrously long shadows stretching before us in the moonlight—I do not think he said in so many words, ‘Will you marry me?’ but somehow, by some signs or words on both our parts, it became clear to us that, by-and-by, if God left him alive, and if the war ever came to an end, he and I should belong to one another. And so, having understood this, when he went he kissed me, as he had done when he came, only this time no one bade him; he did it of his own accord, and a hundred times instead of one; and for my part, this time, instead of standing passive like a log or a post, I kissed him back again, most lovingly, with many tears.
“Ah! parting in those days, when the last kiss to one’s beloved ones was not unlikely to be an adieu until the great Day of Judgment, was a different thing to the listless, unemotional good-byes of these stagnant times of peace!
“And so Bobby also got into a post-chaise and drove away, and we watched him too, till he turned the corner out of our sight, as we had watched father; and then I hid my face among the jessamine flowers that clothed the wall of the house, and wept as one that would not be comforted. However, one cannot weep for ever, or, if one does, it makes one blind and blear, and I did not wish Bobby to have a wife with such defects; so in process of time I dried my tears.