ath.

Toward morning a Rhode Island artilleryman, dying in great pain,
relapsed into coma. Waiting beside him, she wrote to his parents,
enclosing the little keepsakes he had designated when conscious,
while his life flickered with the flickering candle. Her letter
and his life ended together; dawn made the candle-light ghastly; a
few moments later the rumble of the dead waggon sounded in the
court below. The driver came early because there was a good deal
of freight for his waggon that day. A few moments afterward the
detail arrived with the stretchers, and Ailsa stood up, drew aside
the screen, and went down into the gray obscurity of the court-yard.

Grave-diggers were at work on a near hillside; she could hear the
clink clink of spade and pick; reveille was sounding from hill to
hill; the muffled stirring became a dull, sustained clatter, never
ceasing around her for one instant.

A laundress was boiling clothing over a fire near by; Ailsa slipped
off her gingham overdress, unbound the white turban, and tossed
them on the grass near the fire. Then, rolling back her sleeves,
she plunged her arms into a basin of hot water in which a little
powdered camphor was floating.

While busy with her ablutions the two new nurses arrived, seated on
a battery limber; and, hastily drying her hands, she went to them
and welcomed them, gave them tea and breakfast in Dr. West's
office, and left them there while she went away to awake Celia and
Letty, pack her valise for the voyage before her, and write to
Berkley.

But it was not until she saw the sun low in the west from the deck
of the _Mary Lane_, that she at last found a moment to write.

The place, the hour, her loneliness, moved depths in her that she
had never sounded--moved her to a recklessness never dreamed of.
It was an effort for her to restrain the passionate confessions
trembling on her pen's tip; her lips whitened with the cry
struggling for utterance.

"Dear, never before did I so completely know myself, never so
absolutely trust myself to the imperious, almost ungovernable tide
which has taken my destiny from the quiet harbour where it lay, and
which is driving it headlong toward yours.

"You have left me alone, to wonder and to wonder. And while
isolated, I stand trying to comprehend why it was that your words
separated our destinies while your arms around me made them one. I
am perfectly aware that the surge of life has caught me up, tossed
m