No consecrated soldier of a holy war had ever been moved by a purer singleness of purpose than I when I came on board the _Assiniboia_; and now I was already thinking most of something else. As violently—I choose the adverb—as if I had never seen this woman’s image grow fainter and fainter in my memory I craved to know certain things about her. I might state those things in this way: Why, in the summer in which I joined the army and went across with the first Canadian contingent, did she seek the acquaintance of my sister Evelyn and undertake nursing in her company? Why did she join my sister Mabel and steal in and out of my room when I was blind? Why, since I was blind, did she keep her presence unknown to me and swear my sisters to secrecy? Why was she coming back on board this boat? Did she really care for me? And if she really cared for me, why this air of ever so courteous, ever so gentle constraint the minute we were alone and I broached any subject that was personal? Was she angry? Was she contrite? Was she wounded? Was she scornful? Was she proud? Or was she simply subjecting me to one more test, which might end again in her being disappointed? I have to confess that these inquiries already absorbed my soul in such a way that I forgot that on which I had been accustomed to meditate every hour of my time—the approach I was to make to American citizens like Beady Lamont and Ralph Coningsby. Against this weaning away of my heart some essential loyalty cried, “Treason!” I was the man who had put his hand to the plow and was looking back. If I continued to look back I might easily prove unfit for the kingdom of heaven as I conceived of it. Throughout the next day I was eager to test the effect of these counter-inclinations on myself. That I could only do by meeting her. If I met her, would she be to me simply what the Consolatrice was to a more intimate degree? Or should I find her the brave, aspiring, provocative spirit that had led me up the path that had begun to mount from the moment when I first saw her—only in the end to let me fall over the edge of a precipice? I wanted to see; I wanted to be sure. But she kept me waiting. She didn’t appear that day. It was a fine day for the ocean in November, with a tolerably smooth sea. It was not weather, therefore, that confined her to her cabin; it was something else. She knew I would be on the watch for her, and she let me have my labor for my pains.