“Very well, Dad. Then you must do it. I know. But I do wish you could have a day or two more to rest. If you could”—this wistfully—“perhaps they'd let me off part of the time to take care of you. You know, I'm nursing. I'd be stern. You'd have to sleep a lot, and eat just \vhat I gave you.” She patted his arm as she spoke; then added this: “Of course it's not the time to think of personal things. But there's one thing I've got to tell you pretty soon, Dad. A strange experience has come to me. It's puzzling. I can't see the way very clearly. But it's very wonderful. I believe it's right—really right. It's a man.”
She rushed on with it. “I wanted you to meet him to-night. He's—out in the trenches, all day, up the hill. We're expecting word—a cablegram—when they get through to us. And when that comes, I'd have to tell you all about it. He'll come to you then. But I—well, I had to tell you this much. It's been a pretty big experience, and I don't like to think of going through it like this without your even knowing about it from me, and knowing, too, no matter what they may say”—her voice wavered—“that it's—it's—all right.” Her hands reached suddenly up toward his shoulders; she clung to him, like the child she still, in his heart, seemed.
He could trust himself only to speak the little words of comfort he would have used with a child. He felt that he was not helping her; merely standing there, helpless in the grip of a fate that seemed bent on racking his soul to the final Emit of his spiritual endurance.
“This won't do,” she said. “I have no right to give way. They need me in the hospital. I shall think of you every minute, Dad. I'm very proud of you.”
She kissed him and rushed away. He walked back to Elmer Boatwright's room fighting off a sense of unreality that had grown so strong as to be alarming. It was all a nightmare now—the manly dogged faces in the compound, the wailing sounds from the native quarter, the intermittent shots, the smells, the very sun that blazed down on the tiling. Nothing seemed really to matter. He knew well enough, in a corner of his mind, that this mood was the most dangerous of all. It lay but a step from apathy; and apathy, to such a nature as his, would mean the end.
So he busied himself desperately. The simple will he left for Boatwright with instructions that it was to be given to Betty in the event of his death. It seemed that the little man was one of a machine-gun crew and could not be reached until well on in the evening; he had turned fighter, like the others.
He sewed up his tattered knapsack and filled it with a sort of iron ration. He wrote letters, including a long one to Henry Withery, addressed in care of Dr. Hidderleigh's office at Shanghai. He framed with care the messages that were to go over the wires to Peking. He ate alone, and sparingly. And early, as soon as darkness settled over the scene of petty but bitter warfare, he clipped out of the compound and disappeared, carrying no weapon but his walking stick.