ood trial there before he met you.

"You are every inch my ideal of a woman--every fibre in you is
utterly feminine. I adore your acquired courage, I worship your
heavenly inconsistencies. The mental pleasure I experienced with
you was measured and limited only by my own perversity and morbid
self-absorption; the splendour of the passion I divine in you,
unawakened, awes me, leaves me in wonder. The spiritual tonic,
even against my own sickly will has freshened me by mere contact
with the world you live in; the touch of your lips and hands--ah,
Ailsa--has taught me at last the language that I sneered at.

"Well--we can never marry. How it will be with us, how end, He
who, after all is said and done, _did_ construct us, knows now.
And we will know some day, when life is burned out in us.

"Hours, days of bitter revolt come--the old madness for you, the
old recklessness of desire, the savage impatience with life, assail
me still. Because, Ailsa, I would--I _could_ have made you
a--well, an _interesting_ husband, anyway. You were fashioned to
be the divinest wife and . . . I'm not going on in this strain;
I'll write you when I can. And for God's sake take care of your
life. There's nothing left if you go--_nothing_.

"I've made a will. Trooper Burgess, a comrade--my former
valet--carries a duplicate memorandum. Don't weep; I'll live to
make another. But in this one I have written you that my mother's
letters and pictures are to be yours--when I have a chance I'll
draw it in legal form. And, dear, first be perfectly sure I'm
dead, and then destroy my mother's letters without reading them;
and then look upon her face. And I think you will forgive me when
I tell you that it is for her sake that I can never marry. But you
will not understand why."

Over this letter Ailsa had little time to wonder or to make herself
wretched, for that week orders came to evacuate the Farm Hospital
and send all sick and wounded to the General Hospital at Alexandria.

A telegram arrived, too, from Miss Dix, who was authorised to
detail nurses by the Secretary of War, ordering the two nurses of
Sainte Ursula's Sisterhood to await letters of recommendation and
written assignments to another hospital to be established farther
south. But where that hospital was to be built nobody seemed to
know.

A week later a dozen Protestant women nurses arrived at Alexandria,
where they were made unwelcome. Medical directors, surgeons,