ge of the
fighting, where she has seen things as they happen. In her last
letter, she told me that she was only waiting for my uncle's
permission to go out as a nurse."

"Is that what you would do?"

Her head lifted itself proudly.

"No. She can take care of the wounded men, if she chooses. For my
part, I'd rather cheer on the men who are starting for the front. If
I could know that one man, one single man, fought the better for
having known me, I should feel as if I had done my share."

She spoke with fiery vigor; then her eyes dropped again to the
dancing waves. When at length she spoke again, she was once more the
level-voiced English girl who sat next him at the table.

"You are going out to Cape Town to stay, Mr. Weldon?" she asked,
with an accent so utterly conventional that Weldon almost doubted
his own ears.

"To stay until the war ends," he replied, in an accent as
conventional as her own.

"In Cape Town?" Then she felt her eyes drawn to meet his eyes, as he
answered quietly,--

"I shall do my best to make myself a place in the firing line."

Again her conventionality vanished, and she gave him her hand, as if
to seal a compact.

"I hope you will win it and hold it," she responded slowly. "I can
wish you nothing better."

CHAPTER TWO

A berugged, bedraggled bundle of apologies, Miss Ophelia Arthur lay
prone in her steamer chair, her cheeks pale, her eyes closed. Her
conscience, directed towards the interests of her charge, demanded
her presence on deck. Once on deck and apparently on guard, Miss
Arthur limply subsided into a species of coma. Her charge,
meanwhile, rosy and alert, sat in the lee of a friendly ventilating
shaft. Beside her, also in the lee of the ventilating shaft, sat Mr.
Harvard Weldon.

The past week had been full of the petty events which make up life
on shipboard. The trail of smoke from a passing steamer, the first
shoal of flying fish, the inevitable dance, the equally inevitable
concert and, most inevitable of all, the Sabbatic contest between
the captain and the fresh-water clergyman who insists upon reading
service: all these are old details, yet ever new. Throughout them
all, Weldon had sturdily maintained his place at Ethel's side. By
tacit consent, the girl had been transferred to the motherly care of
Mrs. Scott who, after a keen inspection of Weldon, had decided that
it was safe to take upon trust this clean-eyed, long-legged Canadian
who was so obviously