ught; that is my pride; that is my prayer."

And a few lines farther on, "And he's so splendid. Of course you can
imagine how utterly splendid he is. Lady King-Warner, his colonel's
wife, told me yesterday her husband says he's brave beyond anything she
could imagine. He said--she's given me his letter--'the men have picked
up from home this story about angels at Mons and are beginning to
believe they saw them. Tybar says he hopes the angels were near him,
because he thought he was in hell, the particular bit he got into, and
he thinks it must be good for angels, enlarging for their minds, to know
what hell is like! As a matter of fact, Tybar himself is nearer to the
superhuman than anything I saw knocking about at Mons. His daring and
his coolness and his example are a byword in a battalion composed, my
dear, with the solitary exception of the writer, entirely of heroes. In
sticky places Tybar is the most wonderful thing that ever happened. I
like to be near him because his immediate vicinity is unquestionably a
charmed circle; and I shudder to be near him because his is always the
worst spot.'

"Can't you imagine him, Marko?"

II

And always her letters breathed to Sabre his own passionate love of
England, his own poignant sense of possession in her and by her, his own
intolerable aching at the heart at his envisagement of her enormously
beset. They reflected his own frightful oppression and they assuaged it,
as his letters, she told him, assuaged hers, as burdens are assuaged by
mingling of distress. "There is no good news," he told her, "and for me
who can do nothing--and sometimes things are a little difficult with me
here and I suppose that makes it worse--there seems to be no way out.
But your letters are more than good news and more than rescue; they are
courage. Courage is like love, Nona: it touches the spirit; and the
spirit, amazing essence, is like a spring: it is never touched but
it--springs!"

She was working daily at a canteen at Victoria station. She had been on
the night shift "but I can't sleep, I simply cannot sleep nowadays"; and
so, shortly before he wrote to her of his second rejection, she had
changed on to the day shift and at night took out the car to run
arriving men from one terminus to another. "And about twice a week I get
dog-tired and feel sleepy and send the chauffeur with the car and stay
at home and do sleep. It's splendid!"

Northrepps had been handed over to the Red Cross a