She had had her grave doubts, but now the weight of them had been removed from her. Surely that had been because she had not tarried to accept the foiling of her own plans where they had not served the great purpose! The love that had come to Harry was, on the face of it, just the kind of love from which she had most desired to preserve him. Now she saw it as the crown of his happy youth, but still more as the gift that was to bless his manhood to come. The plunging of him into crude and unfamiliar life, which had still lain on his spirit at his first homecoming, and had brought her such trouble of mind on his behalf—he had come through that fire. It was, as Wilbraham had said, the tempering of the steel in him. He would not have been of the fine metal that he was if he had not felt its rigour; and, having gone through it, he would not be what it had made of him if his spirit were not now freed from it. Every letter that he wrote showed him free and untroubled in the life he was living and the work he was doing. He wrote happily and gaily, and as if there was not a care on his mind. They all seemed to take it like that—the boys who were out there, snapping their fingers in the face of Death, who was gibbering at them from every corner and trying to frighten them into respect for his menace. Harry had never feared death, and now he no longer feared life in any of its unfamiliar aspects, but embraced it with all the ardour of his youth, and with it the happiness it had in store for him when the great confusion should be smoothed out. Surely he must be spared, for whom life held so much! It could not be squared with any theory of directing and guiding providence that one who had been dowered with the gifts of life so much above others, and was so much in accord with the higher purposes of life as they had been slowly and sometimes painfully revealed to her, should be denied his full inheritance of life. But so much high promise had been cut down and gathered in to the dreadful harvest. Day after day those long lists came out. Names, names, columns and pages long, and each one of them to some, perhaps to many, so much more than a name. She could only wait and tremble for the tilt of the scales. He had been in the thick of it and was untouched so far, though so many of those who had been fighting around him had fallen. A charmed life? By all the theories to which she wrested her mind she ought to have believed so, as the weeks went by and his letters came. But the dread only increased. She showed little of it. Jane was her frequent companion, and though they never spoke of the dread, each divined much of what the other was thinking.