ssion to smoke.

"I'll have to smoke all I can," he said. "The fellows say cigarettes
are scarce in the trenches. I'm taking a lot over."

He knew a girl who smoked cigarettes, he said. She was a nice girl
too. He couldn't understand it. The way he felt about it, maybe
a cigarette for a girl wasn't a crime. But it led to other
things--drinking, you know, and all that.

"The fellows don't respect a girl that smokes," he said. "That's the
plain truth. I've talked to her a lot about it."

"It wasn't your friend in Toronto, was it?"

"Good heavens, no!" He repudiated the idea with horror.

It was the girl who had to readjust her ideas of life that day. She
had been born and raised in that neutral ground between the lines of
right and wrong, and now suddenly her position was attacked and she
must choose sides. She chose.

"I've smoked a cigarette now and then. If you think it is wrong I'll
not do it any more."

He was almost overcome, both at the confession and at her
renunciation. To tell the truth, among the older Canadian officers
he had felt rather a boy. Her promise reinstated him in his own
esteem. He was a man, and a girl was offering to give something up
if he wished it. It helped a lot.

That evening he laid out his entire equipment in his small cabin,
and invited her to see it. He put his mother's picture behind his
brushes, where the other one had been, and when all was ready he
rang for a stewardess.

"I am going to show a young lady some of my stuff," he explained.
"And as she is alone I wish you'd stay round, will you? I want her
to feel perfectly comfortable."

The stewardess agreed, and as she was an elderly woman, with a son
at the front, a boy like Cecil, she went back to her close little
room over the engines and cried a little, very quietly.

It was unfortunate that he did not explain the presence of the
stewardess to the girl. For when it was all over, and she had stood
rather awed before his mother's picture, and rather to his surprise
had smoothed her hair with one of his brushes, she turned to him
outside the door.

"That stewardess has a lot of nerve," she said. "The idea of
standing in the doorway, rubbering!"

"I asked her," he explained. "I thought you'd prefer having some one
there."

She stared at him.

II

Lethway had won the ship's pool that day. In the evening he played
bridge, and won again. He had been drinking a little. Not much, but
enough to make him reckless.