"If without dishonour to your dear name it lay in my power to keep you with me, do you think I'd have it so? Not I! I'll have you carry on as though I'd never even existed. For me—the work that lies at hand. When that's done—dreams of you. If you were killed you'd live for me—my man I gave for England! Our England that they'll never beat—not even if they win!"
"Thanks, my sweet wife! Then when I say—our honeymoon is over——?"
"Ah, well! ... How soon? ..."
He told her, looking in her eyes, that did not flinch beneath his:
"In four days! The Medical Board finds me quite fit—and there's a Flying billet waiting. Our Western Front...."
She said, as her heart beat on his and their mouths met in a kiss:
"Then—four more days of love with me, and fly, my Bird of War!"
The Chief Scout had said to Sherbrand in those days of July, 1914: "The Saxham breed's a stark breed—hard as granite, supple as incandescent lava, with a strain of Berserk madness, and a dash of Oriental fatalism. They can hate magnificently and forgive grandly, and love to the very verge of Death."
Sherbrand had found it so. He thanked God that this heart that he had won would never change nor fail him. He knew that he could call his own the love that reaches living hands to Love beyond the grave.
THE END