draw the curtain), and I was all
a-tremble as I listened to the story of his hair-breadth escapes, though
he laughed and made so light of them.

It nearly broke my heart that he had not got down to the Pole; and when
he told me that it was the sense of my voice calling to him which had
brought him back from the 88th latitude, I felt as if I had been a
coward, unworthy of the man who loved me.

Sometimes he talked about baby--he called her "Girlie"--telling a funny
story of how he had carried her off from Ilford, where the bricklayer
had suddenly conceived such a surprising affection for my child ("what
he might go so far as to call a fatherly feeling") that he had been
unwilling to part with her until soothed down by a few sovereigns--not
to say frightened by a grasp of Martin's iron hand which had nearly
broken his wrist.

"She's as right as a trivet now, though," said Martin, "and I'll run
down to Chevening every other day to see how she's getting on."

My darling was in great demand from the first, but when he could not be
with me in the flesh he was with me in the spirit, by means of the
newspapers which Mildred brought up in armfuls.

I liked the illustrated ones best, with their pictures of scenes in the
Expedition, particularly the portraits of Martin himself in his
Antarctic outfit, with his broad throat, determined lips, clear eyes,
and that general resemblance to the people we all know which makes us
feel that the great men of every age are brothers of one family.

But what literary tributes there were, too! What interviews, what
articles! A member of the scientific staff had said that "down there,"
with Nature in her wrath, where science was nothing and even physical
strength was not all, only one thing really counted, and that was the
heroic soul, and because Martin had it, he had always been the born
leader of them all.

And then, summing up the tangible gains of the Expedition, the _Times_
said its real value was moral and spiritual, because it showed that in
an age when one half of the world seemed to be thinking of nothing but
the acquisition of wealth (that made me think of my father) and the
other half of nothing but the pursuit of pleasure (that reminded me of
my husband and Alma), there could be found men like Martin Conrad and
his dauntless comrades who had faced death for the sake of an ideal and
were ready to do so again.

Oh dear! what showers of tears I shed over those newspapers! But t