s suffering, she felt oddly
pitiful towards this man, and her inward emotion found vent in words
which surprised her as much as they startled the man to whom they were
addressed.

"Why to-night, Dr. Anstice? Has this day been to you what it has been to
me--a day of the bitterest suffering I have ever known?"

The tone of her deep voice, so oddly gentle, the compassionate
expression in her usually cold blue eyes, were too much for Anstice,
whose endurance was nearly at the breaking point; and he turned to her
with a look in his face which dismayed her, so tragic was it.

"Mrs. Carstairs, this day I have been in--_hell_!" The word sounded
cruelly out of place in the quiet moonlit night. "Once before I fancied
I had reached the point at which a man may turn his back on life and its
horrors without thinking himself a pitiful coward. I suffered then--my
God, how I suffered!--but the torture I have endured to-day makes me
feel as though I have never known what suffering is until now."

Her answer came quickly.

"But you know now that no man can turn his back on life and yet escape
the allegation of cowardice!" It was an assertion rather than a
question. "Dr. Anstice, I don't ask to know what your suffering has
been--I don't want you to tell me--but one thing I do know, that you,
and men like you, are not the ones who give up the battle when the fight
is fiercest."

He delayed his answer so long that Chloe had time to feel curiously
frightened by his silence. And when his reply came it was hardly
reassuring.

"I thought you were too wise a woman to indulge in generalities, Mrs.
Carstairs." His tired voice robbed the words of offence. "And don't you
know that it is never safe to prophesy what a man will do in a battle?
The bravest may turn coward beneath a hail of fire--the man who is
afraid may perform some deed which will entitle him--and rightly--to the
coveted Victoria Cross."

"Yes." She spoke steadily, her eyes on his face. "But that's the
battlefield of the world, Dr. Anstice, the material, earthly
battlefield. It's the battlefield of the soul I was thinking of just
now; and if I may use a quotation which has been battered out of nearly
all its original fine shape by careless usage, to me the truly brave man
is he who remains to the end the--'captain of his soul!'"

Her voice sank on the last words; but Anstice had caught her meaning,
and he turned to her with a new light in his tired eyes.

"Mrs. Carstairs,