was impossible to find--well, any actual proofs of what had happened.
The gap had been filled at once with crowds of yelling jostling Tommies,
mad to get into the town. Jove, how those chaps fight when they get the
chance. When all was over, several were missing who were not among the
dead. They must have forced themselves in where they could not get back,
and been taken prisoners. God alone knows their fate, poor beggars. Yet I
envied them; for when the row was over, my hell began.

"Myra, I would have given my whole life to have had that minute over
again. And it was maddening to know that the business might have been
done all right with any old fuse. Only we were so keen over our new ideas
for signalling, and our portable electric apparatus. Oh, good Lord! I
knew despair, those days and nights! I was down with fever, and they took
away my sword, and guns, and razors. I couldn't imagine why. Even despair
doesn't take me that way. But if a chap could have come into my tent and
said: 'You didn't kill Ingleby after all. He's all right and alive!' I
would have given my life gladly for that moment's relief. But no present
anguish can undo a past mistake.

"Well, I pulled through the fever; life had to be lived, and I suppose
I'm not the sort of chap to take a morbid view. When I found the thing
was to be kept quiet; when the few who knew the ins-and-outs stood by me
like the good fellows they were, saying it might have happened to any of
them, and as soon as I got fit again I should see the only rotten thing
would be to let it spoil my future; I made up my mind to put it clean
away, and live it down. You know they say, out in the great western
country: 'God Almighty hates a quitter.' It is one of the stimulating
tenets of their fine practical theology. I had fought through other hard
times. I determined to fight through this. I succeeded so well, that it
even seemed natural to go on with the work Ingleby and I had been doing
together, and carry it through. And when notes of his were needed, I came
to his own home without a qualm, to ask his widow--the woman I, by my
mistake, had widowed--for permission to have and to use them.

"I came--my mind full of the rich joy of life and love, with scarcely
room for a passing pang of regret, as I entered the house without a
master, the home without a head, knowing I was about to meet the woman I
had widowed. Truly 'The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind
exceeding small.' I ha