He
felt, perhaps, that there was nothing to say. He took to himself no
credit for the things he was 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--.
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