"Ailsa, it isn't likely that anything is going to knock my head off or puncture vital sections of me. But in case the ludicrous should happen, I want you to know that a cleaner man goes before the last Court Marshal than would have stood trial there before he met you.
"You are every inch my ideal of a woman—every fibre in you is utterly feminine. I adore your acquired courage, I worship your heavenly inconsistencies. The mental pleasure I experienced with you was measured and limited only by my own perversity and morbid self-absorption; the splendour of the passion I divine in you, unawakened, awes me, leaves me in wonder. The spiritual tonic, even against my own sickly will has freshened me by mere contact with the world you live in; the touch of your lips and hands—ah, Ailsa—has taught me at last the language that I sneered at.
"Well—we can never marry. How it will be with us, how end, He who, after all is said and done, did construct us, knows now. And we will know some day, when life is burned out in us.
"Hours, days of bitter revolt come—the old madness for you, the old recklessness of desire, the savage impatience with life, assail me still. Because, Ailsa, I would—I could have made you a—well, an interesting husband, anyway. You were fashioned to be the divinest wife and . . . I'm not going on in this strain; I'll write you when I can. And for God's sake take care of your life. There's nothing left if you go—nothing.
"I've made a will. Trooper Burgess, a comrade—my former valet—carries a duplicate memorandum. Don't weep; I'll live to make another. But in this one I have written you that my mother's letters and pictures are to be yours—when I have a chance I'll draw it in legal form. And, dear, first be perfectly sure I'm dead, and then destroy my mother's letters without reading them; and then look upon her face. And I think you will forgive me when I tell you that it is for her sake that I can never marry. But you will not understand why."
Over this letter Ailsa had little time to wonder or to make herself wretched, for that week orders came to evacuate the Farm Hospital and send all sick and wounded to the General Hospital at Alexandria.
A telegram arrived, too, from Miss Dix, who was authorised to detail nurses by the Secretary of War, ordering the two nurses of Sainte Ursula's Sisterhood to await letters of recommendation and written assignments to another hospital to be established farther south. But where that hospital was to be built nobody seemed to know.
A week later a dozen Protestant women nurses arrived at Alexandria, where they were made unwelcome. Medical directors, surgeons, ward masters objected, bluntly declaring that they wouldn't endure a lot of women interfering and fussing and writing hysterical nonsense to the home newspapers.
For a while confusion reigned, intensified by the stupendous mobilisation going on all around.
A medical officer came to the Farm Hospital and angrily informed Ailsa that the staff had had enough of women in the wards; and from forty cots forty half-dead, ghastly creatures partly rose and cursed the medical gentleman till his ears burned crimson,