ul!
It stood by me so obviously. For instance, the night before San Juan, in
the mill at El Poso, I slept on the same poncho with another
correspondent. I woke up with a raging appetite for bacon and coffee,
and he woke up out of his mind, and with a temperature of one hundred
and four. And again, I was standing by Capron's gun at El Caney, when a
shell took the three men who served it, and only scared _me_. And
there was another time--" He stopped. "Anyway," he laughed, "here I am."

"But there was one night, one awful night," began the girl. She
trembled, and he made this an added excuse for drawing her closer to
him. "When I felt you were in great peril, that you would surely die.
And all through the night I knelt by the window and looked toward Cuba
and prayed, and prayed to God to let you live."

Chesterton bent his head and kissed the tips of her fingers. After a
moment he said: "Would you know what night it was? It might be curious
if I had been--"

"Would I know!" cried the girl. "It was eight days ago. The night of
the twelfth. An awful night!"

"The twelfth!" exclaimed Chesterton, and laughed and then begged her
pardon humbly. "I laughed because the twelfth," he exclaimed, "was the
night peace was declared. The war was over. I'm sorry, but _that_ night
I was riding toward you, thinking only of you. I was never for a moment
in danger."

THE AMATEUR

I

It was February off the Banks, and so thick was the weather that, on the
upper decks, one could have driven a sleigh. Inside the smoking-room
Austin Ford, as securely sheltered from the blizzard as though he had
been sitting in front of a wood fire at his club, ordered hot gin for
himself and the ship's doctor. The ship's doctor had gone below on
another "hurry call" from the widow. At the first luncheon on board the
widow had sat on the right of Doctor Sparrow, with Austin Ford facing
her. But since then, except to the doctor, she had been invisible. So,
at frequent intervals, the ill health of the widow had deprived Ford of
the society of the doctor. That it deprived him, also, of the society of
the widow did not concern him. _Her_ life had not been spent upon ocean
liners; she could not remember when state-rooms were named after the
States of the Union. She could not tell him of shipwrecks and salvage,
of smugglers and of the modern pirates who found their victims in the
smoking-room.

Ford was on his way to England to act as the London corr