But that was all very, very long ago, and he scarcely remembered now the boyish rage in which he had raved and had torn the hated letters and stamped them into the floor of the cabin. He had chased feverishly to New York after her, and he had walked the city, without a starting point and without direction, looking for her, as he and she together had once walked the streets looking for Rose Wilding. Then, when at last he had become convinced that it was useless, that he would never find Augusta until the time that she should choose, he had gone back to the lake, to the Hills of Desire, to wait for her. He found Donahue browsing contentedly among the trees much as he had left him, and a world mockingly unchanged. Of course, he could not stay there. The haunting, whispering sweetness of Augusta's presence was there at every turn of his eyes, in the breath of every breeze that brushed his cheek, in the song of every bird that piped. There memories choked him, of the nights when she had fought the fever with him, of days when their hearts had danced together in the joy of work. There he had learned why the human race continues to wish to live--he had learned to know a sweet woman's heart. On the morning of the fourth day he went down to the station and bought a ticket for Montreal. The station agent-postmistress told him with a simper that there were letters for him. "Will you please keep them," Wardwell requested politely, "until I call on my way back. I--I might lose them." The next day he was a member of a Canadian infantry regiment, on his way to an assembling camp. Through two years he had lived and fought, as other men lived and fought. He had lain sick and had thirsted and despaired, as other men did; and he had seen how other men died. About the last matter he was not surprised, except at the unwinking simplicity of it. A man stood beside you and asked for a chew of tobacco. The next time you looked at him he was a corpse, to be buried at once--if there was time. A man ran shouting by your side, and passed you, perhaps, and when you caught up with him he was dead. And they went out so untragically true to their ruling habit and disposition. A talkative man died talking. A quiet man turned his head from you and died his own way. They had been sickening years, those two years when the claws of the Beast were at the throat of the world. And there had been many times when Wardwell, in the spirit weariness which every good man felt sooner or later, would have been willing to lie down and ask for death, saying that he had done his share. But death had not come for him, and his mind had turned definitely back and rested with conviction on the sentence which Augusta had written for him. They were not to have this life together, but he would not go from here until he had seen her.