riously, fixing him with his eyes as though
deep in consideration. At last he smiled gravely.

"You are right," he said. "Let us both remember her in our prayers."

As Chesterton rode away the words remained gratefully in his memory and
filled him with pleasant thoughts. "The world," he mused, "is full of
just such kind and gentle souls."

After an interminable delay he reached Newport, and they escaped from
the others, and Miss Armitage and he ran down the lawn to the rocks, and
stood with the waves whispering at their feet.

It was the moment for which each had so often longed, with which both
had so often tortured themselves by living in imagination, that now,
that it was theirs, they were fearful it might not be true.

Finally, he said: "And the charm never failed! Indeed, it was wonderful!
It stood by me so obviously. For instance, the night before San Juan,
in the mill at El Poso, I slept on the same poncho with another
correspondent. I woke up with a raging appetite for bacon and coffee,
and he woke up out of his mind, and with a temperature of one hundred
and four. And again, I was standing by Capron's gun at El Caney, when
a shell took the three men who served it, and only scared ME. And there
was another time--" He stopped. "Anyway," he laughed, "here I am."

"But there was one night, one awful night," began the girl. She
trembled, and he made this an added excuse for drawing her closer to
him. "When I felt you were in great peril, that you would surely die.
And all through the night I knelt by the window and looked toward Cuba
and prayed, and prayed to God to let you live."

Chesterton bent his head and kissed the tips of her fingers. After a
moment he said: "Would you know what night it was? It might be curious
if I had been--"

"Would I know!" cried the girl. "It was eight days ago. The night of the
twelfth. An awful night!"

"The twelfth!" exclaimed Chesterton, and laughed and then begged her
pardon humbly. "I laughed because the twelfth," he exclaimed, "was the
night peace was declared. The war was over. I'm sorry, but THAT night I
was riding toward you, thinking only of you. I was never for a moment in
danger."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Charmed Life, by Richard Harding Davis

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