educes itself to the man on his right, the man on his left, the man
across, beyond the barbed wire, and a woman.

The boy was a Canadian. He was twenty-two and not very tall. His
name in this story is Cecil Hamilton. He had won two medals for
life-saving, each in a leather case. He had saved people from
drowning. When he went abroad to fight he took the medals along. Not
to show. But he felt that the time might come when he would not be
sure of himself. A good many men on the way to war have felt that
way. The body has a way of turning craven, in spite of high
resolves. It would be rather comforting, he felt, to have those
medals somewhere about him at that time. He never looked at them
without a proud little intake of breath and a certain swelling of
the heart.

On the steamer he found that a medal for running had slipped into
one of the cases. He rather chuckled over that. He had a sense of
humour, in spite of his seven-word creed. And a bit of superstition,
for that night, at dusk, he went out on to the darkened deck and
flung it overboard.

The steamer had picked him up at Halifax--a cold dawn, with a few
pinched faces looking over the rail. Forgive him if he swaggered up
the gangway. He was twenty-two, he was a lieutenant, and he was a
fighting man.

The girl in the story saw him then. She was up and about, in a short
sport suit, with a white tam-o'-shanter on her head and a white
woolen scarf tucked round her neck. Under her belted coat she wore a
middy blouse, and when she saw Lieutenant Cecil Hamilton, with
his eager eyes--not unlike her own, his eyes were young and
inquiring--she reached into a pocket of the blouse and dabbed her
lips with a small stick of cold cream.

Cold air has a way of drying lips.

He caught her at it, and she smiled. It was all over for him then,
poor lad!

Afterward, when he was in the trenches, he wondered about that. He
called it "Kismet" to himself. It was really a compound, that first
day or two, of homesickness and a little furtive stirring of anxiety
and the thrill of new adventure that was in his blood.

On the second afternoon out they had tea together, she in her
steamer chair and he calmly settled next to her, in a chair
belonging to an irritated English lawyer. Afterward he went down to
his cabin, hung round with his new equipment, and put away the
photograph of a very nice Toronto girl, which had been propped up
back of his hairbrushes.

They got rather well ac