rry unless she loved a person very
much.

He eyed her wistfully when she said that.

At dusk he told her about the girl in Toronto.

"It wasn't an engagement, you understand. But we've been awfully
good friends. She came to see me off. It was rather awful. She
cried. She had some sort of silly idea that I'll get hurt."

It was her turn to look wistful. Oh, they were getting on! When he
went to ask the steward to bring tea to the corner they had found,
she looked after him. She had been so busy with her own worries that
she had not thought much of the significance of his neatly belted
khaki. Suddenly it hurt her. He was going to war.

She knew little about the war, except from the pictures in
illustrated magazines. Once or twice she had tried to talk about it
with Mabel, but Mabel had only said, "It's fierce!" and changed the
subject.

The uniforms scattered over the ship and the precautions taken at
night, however, were bringing this thing called war very close to
her. It was just beyond that horizon toward which they were heading.
And even then it was brought nearer to her.

Under cover of the dusk the girl she had tried to approach came up
and stood beside her. Edith was very distant with her.

"The nights make me nervous," the girl said. "In the daylight it is
not so bad. But these darkened windows bring it all home to me--the
war, you know."

"I guess it's pretty bad."

"It's bad enough. My brother has been wounded. I am going to him."

Even above the sound of the water Edith caught the thrill in her
voice. It was a new tone to her, the exaltation of sacrifice.

"I'm sorry," she said. And some subconscious memory of Mabel made
her say: "It's fierce!"

The girl looked at her.

"That young officer you're with, he's going, of course. He seems
very young. My brother was older. Thirty."

"He's twenty-two."

"He has such nice eyes," said the girl. "I wish----"

But he was coming back, and she slipped away.

During tea Cecil caught her eyes on him more than once. He had taken
off his stiff-crowned cap, and the wind blew his dark hair round.

"I wish you were not going to the war," she said unexpectedly. It
had come home to her, all at once, the potentialities of that trim
uniform. It made her a little sick.

"It's nice of you to say that."

There was a new mood on her, of confession, almost of consecration.
He asked her if he might smoke. No one in her brief life had ever
before asked her permi