He made no objection, however, when, a little later, I received from my uncle a draft for my entire fortune and announced my intention of handing the sum over to Mr. Strangways for investment. Hugh probably looked on the amount as too insignificant to talk about; in addition to which some Brokenshire instinct for the profitable may have led him to appreciate a thing so good as to make it folly to say nay to it. The result was that I heard from Larry Strangways, in letters which added nothing to my comfort. I don't know what I expected him to say; but, whatever it was, he didn't say it. He wasn't curt; his letters were not short. On the contrary, he wrote at length, and brought up subjects that had nothing to do with certificates of stock. But they were all political or international, or related in one way or another to the ideal of his heart--England and America! The British Empire and the United States! The brotherhood of democracies! Why in thunder had the bally world waited so long for the coalition of dominating influences which alone could keep it straight? Why dream of the impossible when the practical had not as yet been tried? Why talk peace, peace, when there was no peace at The Hague, if a full and controlling sympathy could be effected nearer home--let us say at Ottawa? He was going to Canada to enlist; he would start in a few days' time; but he was doing it not merely to fight for the Cause; he was going to be one man, at least, just a straggling democratic scout--one of a forlorn hope, if you chose to call it so--to offer his life to a union of which the human race had the same sort of need as human beings of wedlock. And in all this there was no reference to me. He might not have loved me; I might not have loved him. I answered the letters in the vein in which they were written, and once or twice showed my replies to Hugh. "Forget it!" was his ordinary comment. "The American eagle is too wise an old bird to be caught with salt on its tail." Perhaps it was because Larry Strangways made no appeal to me that I gave myself to forwarding his work with a more enthusiastic zeal. I had to do it quietly, for fear of offending Hugh; but I got my opportunities--that is, I got my opportunities to talk, though I saw I made no impression. I was only a girl--the queer Canadian who had been Ethel Rossiter's nursery governess and whom the Brokenshire family, for unexplained reasons, had accepted as Hugh's future wife. What could I know about matters at which statesmen had always shied? It was preposterous that I should speak of them; it was presumptuous. Nobody told me that; I saw it in people's eyes.