ack square, as
innocent of his surroundings as if he had been asleep, and mechanically
filled and lit his pipe, and stood on with his chin sunk upon his
breast, scarcely aware of his own thoughts, and as yet realising little
but solitude and an ache in the doleful middle of it. But a warmth stole
into the cold. When everything was said and done, there was one thing
left. Irene loved him. Loved him! How sweet and sacred a wonder. Yet her
own dear lips had told him that she would have been proud and happy to
be his wife, and that nothing should change her. And she had given him
an ambition. The lofty and inspiring words were not yet written, but
their purport thrilled him, as it thrilled many who went out to fight
and bleed for a cause which may not have been wholly worthy of their
devotion, and yet in a sense was worthy because they believed in it with
all their hearts and souls. For, after all, what is it but the purpose
which ennobles action? If the greatest Englishman since Shakespeare had
not yet given Polson Jervase the words in which to speak his thought, it
lightened his breast all the same.

I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll'd,
Tho' many a light shall darken, and many shall weep
For those that are crush'd in the clash of jarring claims,
Yet God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar;
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,
And noble thought be freer under the sun.
And the heart of a people beat with one desire;
For the peace, that I deem'd no peace, is over and done,
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

So thought Polson Jervase, and so thought hundreds of valiant men who
were ready to lay down their lives in a quarrel which the years have
proved unprofitable.

But a voice awoke the recruity from his reverie--a voice of authority
which asked with a most unnecessary emphasis what the blank, blank he
meant by skulking there, when he knew conventionally well that he had
been conventionally well ordered to the quartermaster's stores to get
his conv