he
heard his Chief discourse at such length, and never had he heard
his Chief use the word "danger." It began to dawn upon his mind that
possibly it might not be such a crime as he had at first considered it
to lure Cameron away from his newly made home and his newly wedded wife
to do this bit of service for his country in an hour of serious if not
desperate need.

CHAPTER III

A-FISHING WE WILL GO

But Sergeant Cameron was done with the Service for ever. An accumulating
current of events had swept him from his place in the Force, as an
unheeding traveler crossing a mountain torrent is swept from his feet
by a raging freshet. The sudden blazing of his smoldering love into a
consuming flame for the clumsy country girl, for whom two years ago he
had cherished a pitying affection, threw up upon the horizon of his life
and into startling clearness a new and absorbing objective. In one brief
quarter of an hour his life had gathered itself into a single purpose; a
purpose, to wit, to make a home to which he might bring this girl he had
come to love with such swift and fierce intensity, to make a home for
her where she could be his own, and for ever. All the vehement passion
of his Highland nature was concentrated upon the accomplishing of
this purpose. That he should ever have come to love Mandy Haley, the
overworked slattern on her father's Ontario farm, while a thing of
wonder, was not the chief wonder to him. His wonder now was that he
should ever have been so besottedly dull of wit and so stupidly unseeing
as to allow the unlovely exterior of the girl to hide the radiant soul
within. That in two brief years she had transformed herself into a woman
of such perfectly balanced efficiency in her profession as nurse, and a
creature of such fascinating comeliness, was only another proof of his
own insensate egotism, and another proof, too, of those rare powers that
slumbered in the girl's soul unknown to herself and to her world. Small
wonder that with her unfolding Cameron's whole world should become new.

Hard upon this experience the unexpected news of his father's death and
of the consequent winding up of the tangled affairs of the estate threw
upon Cameron the responsibility of caring for his young sister, now left
alone in the Homeland, except for distant kindred of whom they had but
slight knowledge.

A home was immediately and imperatively necessary, and hence he must at
once, as a preliminary, be married.