And then one day a burst of shrapnel from the remote earth shattered his plane and him. A slug of iron went upward through his hip and another nicked off a bit of his shoulder. But he brought his wounded machine safely to earth and toppled into the arms of the hospital aids; went backward in a motor-ambulance to a receiving-station, then back in a train, then across the Channel, then across the ocean in a steamer to be sunk by a submarine and brought ashore in a lifeboat. Strathdene had pretty well tested the modern systems of vehicular transportation.
The surgeons mended his wounds, but his nerves had felt the shrapnel. That was why the sea voyage had been advised. Strathdene seemed to have a magnetic gift for adventure. An aircraft gun brought him down from the clouds and a submersible ship came up from the deeps to have a try at him. Before long Kedzie would be saying that fate had taken all this trouble just to bring him and her together.
In the transfer from the ship to the lifeboat Strathdene's wounds were wrenched and his sufferings renewed. He was lucky enough to fall into the hands of Charity Coe Cheever. She was a war nurse of experience, and he was soon well enough to try to flirt with her. But she had been experienced also in the amorous symptoms of convalescent soldiers and she repressed his ardor skilfully. She put an ice-cap on his heart and head.
As soon as he was up and about again he met Kedzie. It seemed to be her business to take away from Charity Coe all of Charity's conquests, and the young Marquess found her hospitable to his hunger for friendship.
Before the first day's acquaintance was over Kedzie was as fascinated by his chatter as Desdemona was by Othello's anecdotes.
One night Kedzie dreamed that she was a Marquessess or whatever the wife of a Marquess would be styled.
Kedzie was herself again. Kedzie was dreaming again. She had an ambition for something higher than her station. She made haste to encourage the infatuated Marquess. Counting upon winning him somehow as her husband, she gave him encouragement beyond any she had given her other swains.
But Strathdene had no intention of marrying her or any other woman. His heart was in the highlands, the cloudlands; his heart was not there.
A purer patriot or a warrior more free of any taint of caution than Strathdene could not be imagined, but otherwise he was as arrant a scamp as ever. While he waited for strength to “carry on” in the brave, new, English sense, it amused him to “carry on” in the mischievous old American sense.
Kedzie was determined that he should live long enough for her to free herself from Jim and make the marquisate hers. She seemed to be succeeding. She found Strathdene as easy of fascination as her old movie audiences had been. He even tried to write poetry about her pout; but he was a better rider on an aeroplane than on Pegasus.