The words took me so much by surprise that I hadn’t time to get angry. All I could feel was a foolish, nervous kind of coolness. “Lovey, what I want you to know I’ll tell you; and at present I’m telling you this: I’ve got to get out; I’ve got to get out quick; and I need you to buck me up. No one can buck me up like you.” “Oh, if it’s that!” He would have followed me then to places more dreadful than the Canadian woods. “Will you take all your suits—or only just them new summer things?” _CHAPTER XVIII_ Thus it happened that when war broke out I was deep in the wilderness. For more than a month I had had no contact with the outside world, not a letter, not a newspaper. I had escaped from New York without leaving an address, since Cantyre was absent. I had meant to write to him to have my letters forwarded, but I never had. Could I have guessed that war was to begin and to last so long I might have acted differently; but the name of Gavrilo Prinzip was still meaningless. All sportsmen in my part of Canada know Jack Hiller’s, just as frequenters of the Adirondacks know Paul Smith’s. From Jack Hiller’s we struck farther in, to the rude camp where I had spent many a happy holiday when I was a lad. Two guides, an Indian and a half-breed, did the heavy work; and some long-forgotten, atavistic sporting strain in Lovey allowed him, groaningly and discontentedly, to enjoy himself. But if I expected to find peace I saw I was mistaken. The distance I had put between myself and the house dominating Long Island Sound was only geographical. In spirit I was always back on that veranda, living through again the minutes of the long waiting. So the solitude was no solitude for me. And then one day the half-breed’s canoe shot over the waters of the lake, bringing supplies from Jack Hiller’s, with the news that the world had gone to war. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of men and women there are to whom the war came as a blessed opportunity to get away from uselessness or heartache. Stranded, purposeless, spiritless, futile, tired, empty, with something broken in the life or seemingly at an end, they suddenly found themselves called on to put forth energies they never knew they had, to meet needs they had never heard of. “Son of man, can these dry bones live?” one might have been asking oneself a few years previously; and all at once there were multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision, energized into newness of being. Among them I was only one humble, stupid individual; but the summons was like that which came to the dust when it was bidden to be Adam and a man.