“It can’t get hold of me again, because there will be nothing for it to catch on by. That’s all over for me. It could no more seize anything I am now than you or I”—she pointed to a flock of little birds riding up and down on a long, smooth billow—“from the deck of this ship could catch one of those Mother Carey’s chickens.” My sensations were those of a man who has received an extraordinary bit of good news, like that of a great artistic triumph or the inheritance of a fortune. It was something that went to the foundations of life, bathing them in security and peace. As we continued to talk the swing of the boat became the lulling of strong arms. The conflict of which for the past few days my mind had been the battle-ground was suddenly appeased. Woman, love, marriage, the more comforting elements in life—were no longer in opposition to what had become a man’s pressing and sacred duties. There could be a love which asked for no moratorium; or rather, there could be a woman with the courage of a soldier. I began to see her as comparable to that crusader’s wife who, disguised as a page, followed her lord on his journeys, to share his perils and minister to his needs. In a modern girl it was not only romantic; it was adorable. That it should have been done for me was beyond my power to believe. None but the bravest and most daring spirit would have attempted it—none but the heart capable of climbing higher and more adventurously still. I had known her for a gallant soul from that midnight minute when she pulled aside her hangings and found me lurking in her chamber; but I had never made a forecast of the heroisms and fidelities expanding here like the beauty from the heart of a rose. _CHAPTER XXIII_ So we came to that last evening on board, of which I must now tell you. It had taken me the intervening time to get used to the new outlook. The habit of seeing myself surrounded by a whole stockade of prohibitions was too strong to overcome in a flash. I had to let my mind emerge into freedom gently, telling myself each day that with a wife like this I could serve the cause more devotedly than ever, since she would be serving it too. Of that dedication to a cause I was possibly too much aware. My uniform made me aware of it. My game leg and my sightless eye made me aware of it. The need of whole peoples, like the French and British and Italian, of every man who could fire a gun or ram home a bayonet or speak a rousing word—that more than anything else seemed to put a consecration upon me of which I was as foolishly and yet as loftily conscious as a modern king, accustomed to a bowler hat, when he rides through the streets with his crown on. And on the last evening there was enough of the ecstatic in the air to justify this sense of a mission.