above the crowd on the
shoulders of tall men. Her eyes were too young for tears--and for that
matter, tears came to her but seldom in later years--and the lips that
shouted "bood-bye" smiled, unconscious of bravery, as she swung her
hat with its symbolic colors above her shining head.

That was the picture that three of us carried to the front.

We left him--all his errors redeemed by a noble death--with his face
turned up to the stars, as silent, as mysterious as they, after our
first battle.

From the horrors of that night we two came away bound by an oath to
care for that child.

* * * * *

Again my memory shifted to the days that found her a woman. Fair,
beautiful, dainty, her father's daughter in looks, but inheriting from
a rare mother a peculiar strength of character, a moral force rarely
found with such a temperament and such beauty.

We had aided to raise her as became the child of her father, whose
story she knew as soon as she was able to understand, but she knew it
from the lips of the brave mother, who cherished his memory. Until she
was a woman grown it was I, however, who, of her two self-appointed
guardians, had watched over her. Children did not interest him.

He had married some years before that time, married well with an eye
to a calm comfortable future, as became an artist who could not be
hampered by the need of money.

Indeed, it was not until he knew that I was to marry her that he
really looked at her.

And I, with all my experience of him, simply because I was never able
to understand the dual nature, failed at that fatal hour when we stood
together beside our protegee to apply to the situation the knowledge
that years of experience should have taught me.

I was so bound up in my own feelings that I failed to remember that,
until then, I had never had a great emotion that his nature had not
acted as a lens in the kindling.

Then, too, there was a dense sense of the conventional--a logical
enough birthright--in my make-up. I, who had known him so long, so
well, seemed, nevertheless, when he married, to have fancied there was
some hocus-pocus in the ceremony, which should make a definite change
in a man's character, as well as a presumable change in his way of
life.

It must have been that there, in the open, at the foot of the knoll, I
slept, as one does the first night after a long awaited death, when
the relief that pain is passed, and suspense en