“Don’t think me a prig,” she pleaded. “I’m talking as if I knew all about it. I don’t really. I grope in the dark; and now and then—at least so it seems to me—I catch a glint of light. We are powerless in ourselves. It is only God working through us that enables us to be of any use. All we can do is to keep ourselves kind and clean and free from self, waiting for Him to come to us.” “She deserves the Croix de Guerre, if it is proved that she did it,” he thought. “She will have saved many thousands of lives—for the present.”!

She had been fashioned to be his helpmate, as surely as if she had been made of the same bone. Nature was at one with God. Spirit and body both yearned for him. It was not position—power for herself that she craved. The marriage market—if that had been her desire: it had always been open to her. She had the gold that buys these things. Wealth, ambition: they had been offered to her—spread out temptingly before her eyes. They were always within her means, if ever she chose to purchase them. It was this man alone to whom she had ever felt drawn—this man of the people, with that suggestion about him of something primitive, untamed, causing her always in his presence that faint, compelling thrill of fear, who stirred her blood as none of the polished men of her own class had ever done. His kind, strong, ugly face: it moved beside her: its fearless, tender eyes now pleading, now commanding. “No,” Joan answered. “I was too late. She had died the night before. I hardly recognized her when I saw her. She looked so sweet and young.”

“Give him our love,” he said. “Tell him we came together, at the end.” “I called at your diggings,” he said. “I had to go through London. They told me you had started. It is good of you.” “They didn’t get on very well together, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle?” Joan queried, scenting the opportunity of obtaining first-class evidence.