g her incredulity. Even to himself it
sounded preposterous that he, an outsider, should claim to bear so
intimate a message from a husband who was dead. "You believed, Lady
Dawn, that you had ceased to count in your husband's affections; yet
wherever his battalion went, you were present with us. The men and
officers knew you, without knowing who you were. You were with us in
the mud of the Somme; you went over the top with us in our attacks. More
than one young officer believed himself in love with you. Yours was the
last woman's face that many a poor fellow looked upon before he went
West. We were an emotional lot. Death made us natural as children. Women
meant more to us than they ever had before and than they ever will
again, perhaps. The nearness to eternity purged us of impurity. It fired
us with a wistful kind of chivalry. The change is hard to express. I've
known men, who hadn't a wife or sweetheart, cut strange women's
portraits from the illustrated papers and treasure them. As we sit here
it sounds a waste of sentiment; out there it seemed tragically pathetic.
Every man wanted to believe, even though his believing was a conscious
pretense, that there was one woman peculiarly his, who would miss----"

He interrupted himself to glance again across his shoulder, following
her eyes where they probed the stealthy shadows. Then he brought his
gaze back. "That was how I first learnt to know your face--from the
portrait which your husband carried. Into whatever danger he was
ordered, you went--you accompanied him in the most real sense: he
carried you in his heart. From time to time I got glimpses of you. When
he thought no one was looking, he would prop your portrait against the
walls of dug-outs with a candle lighted before it, as if you were a
saint whom he worshiped. You were the inspiration of his steadfastness
to duty. What he did, he did for you. His courage was your courage; his
kindness was your kindness. He was striving every minute to be worthy of
you. I know of what I'm talking, for I did the same for Terry. Late at
night one would stumble down greasy dug-out stairs, coming in from a
patrol, to find him lost in thought and gazing at you. Or one would find
him covering page after page of letters which he never sent. When he was
dying, alone and far out in No Man's Land, he must have drawn out your
portrait from next his heart. It was so tightly clasped in his hand when
we found him, that we couldn't take it f