a
proud and happy woman."

We remained there, I don't know how long--she with her hand on my
shoulder, I caressing her dear hair. It was a tremendous temptation. To
have my beloved Betty in all her exquisite warm loyalty bound to me for
the rest of my crippled life. But I found the courage to say:

"My dear, you are young still, with the wonderful future that no one
alive can foretell before you, and I am old--"

"You're not fifty."

"Still I am old, I belong to the past--to a sort of affray behind an
ant-hill which they called a war. I'm dead, my dear, you are gloriously
alive. I'm of the past, as I say. You're of the future. You, my
dearest, are the embodiment of the woman of the Great War--" I
smiled--"The Woman of the Great War in capital letters. What your
destiny is, God knows. But it isn't to be tied to a Prehistoric Man
like me."

She rose and stood, with her beautiful bare arms behind her, sweet,
magnificent.

"I am a Woman of the Great War. You are quite right. But in a year or
so I shall be like other women of the war who have suffered and spent
their lives, a woman of the past--not of the future. All sorts of
things have been burned up in it." In a quick gesture she stretched out
her hands to me. "Oh, can't you understand?"

I cannot set down the rest of the tender argument. If she had loved me
less, she could have lived in my house, like Phyllis, without a thought
of the conventions. But loving me dearly, she had got it into her
feminine head that the sacredness of the marriage tie would crown with
dignity and beauty the part she had resolved to play for my happiness.

Well, if I have yielded I pray it may not be set down to me for selfish
exploitation of a woman's exhausted hour. When I said something of the
sort, she laughed and cried:

"Why, I'm bullying you into it!"

The First of January, 1917--the dawn to me, a broken derelict, of the
annus mirabilis. Somehow, foolishly, illogically, I feel that it will
be the annus mirabilis for my beloved country.

And come--after all--I am, in spite of my legs, a Man too of the Great
War. I have lived in it, and worked in it, and suffered in it--and in
it have I won a Great Thing.

So long as one's soul is sound--that is the Great Matter.

Just before we parted last night, I said to Betty:

"The beginning and end of all this business is that you're afraid of
Marigold."

She started back indignantly.

"I'm not! I'm not!"

I laughed. "The Lady