“Never mind that,” Evelyn said, an instant later, the look of agony leaving her face as suddenly as it had appeared. “You have more to tell me?” “Yes. I must make a confession of grave fault in myself, and ask your forgiveness. The man, Campbell, your father, gave me a bundle of papers, as I told you a little while ago, and I have been impertinently asking myself ever since what I ought to do with them. It did not occur to me then that there was no question for me to decide; that my undoubted duty was simply to place the papers in your hands, as I now do”—withdrawing the parcel from a pocket and placing it in her lap. Dorothy had returned it to him for that purpose. He continued:— “I had not learned my lesson then. I still thought it my duty to guard and protect you, as one guards and protects a child. I reasoned that those papers very probably contained information or statements, true or false, that would afflict you sorely, and I impertinently desired to spare you the affliction. On the other hand, I realised that they might contain, instead, information of the utmost consequence to you and calculated to bring gladness rather than sorrow to your heart. In my perplexity I turned to Dorothy for help. All of us who know Dorothy do that, you know. I sent the papers to her, explaining my perplexity concerning them. I asked her to examine them and determine whether or not they should be given to you. “Then I learned my first lesson. Dorothy wrote to me, rebuking me with severity for my presumption. She explained to me what I ought to have understood for myself—that the question of what it was best to do with the papers was not mine to decide, or hers; that I had no shadow of right to ask her to read the documents, and she no possible right to read them. She bade me come to Wyanoke and do my duty like a man. “That is the real reason I am here; for as to my wound, I should have left that to take care of itself. If it had made an end of me, so much the better.” “You have no right, I reckon, to say that,” interrupted Evelyn, “or to think it, or to feel it. It is a suicidal thought, and quite unworthy of a brave man.” “But my life is my own, and surely—” “Not altogether your own; perhaps not chiefly. It belongs in part to those of us who—I mean to all who care for you, all to whom your death would bring sorrow or to whom your living might be of benefit. Above all it belongs to our country and our cause. You recognise that fact in being a soldier. No; I reckon your life is not your own to do with as you please. It is cowardly in you to think in that way, just as it is cowardly for one to commit suicide because he is in trouble out of which death seems the only way of escape, or the easiest way. So please never let yourself think in that way again.” “I will try not to,” he replied, looking at his lecturer with undisguised admiration.