as doing. If age and infirmity had brought
to him a realization of all that he had missed, he was surely not to be
praised for doing that which was, obviously, his duty.

Yet it gave him a new zest for life, and left Jean freer than she had
been before. It left her, too, without the fear of him, which had
robbed their relationship of all sense of security.

"You see, I never knew," she wrote in her memory book, "what might
happen. I had visions of myself going after him in the night as Derry
had gone and his mother. I used to dream about it, and dread it."

Yet she had said nothing of her dread to Derry in her smiling letters,
and as men think of women, he had thought of her in the sick room as a
guardian angel, shining and serene.

* * * * * *

And now, faint and far came to the men in the cantonments the sound of
battles across the sea. The bugles calling them each morning seemed to
say, "Soon, soon, you will go, you will go, you will go--"

To Derry, listening, it seemed the echo of the fairy trumpets,
"_Trutter-a-trutt, trutter-a-trutt, you will go, you will go, you will
go--_"

It was strange how the thought of it drew him, drew him as even the
thoughts of Jean his bride did not draw--. He remembered that years
ago he had smiled with a tinge of tolerant sophistication over the old
lines:

"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more--"

Yet here it was, a truth in his own life. A woman meaning more to him
than she could ever have meant in times of peace, because he could go
forth to fight for her, his life at stake, for her. It was for her,
and for other women that his sword was unsheathed.

"If only they could understand it," he wrote to Jean. "You haven't any
idea what rotten letters some of the women write. Blaming the men for
going over seas. Blaming them for going into it at all. Taking it as
a personal offense that their lovers have left them. 'If you had loved
me, you couldn't have left me,' was the way one woman put it, and I
found a poor fellow mooning over it and asked him what was the matter.
'It isn't a question of what we want to do, it is a question of what
we've got to do, if we call ourselves men,' he said. But she couldn't
see that, she was measuring her emotions by an inch rule.

"But, thank God, most of the women are the real thing--true as steel
and brave. And it is those women that the men worship. It is a
mascu