The sense of injury and misunderstanding which he had at first nursed had drifted away. Neither did he feel any of the self blame with which he had loaded himself in the beginning. Augusta had not done this thing to them. Neither had his foolish doing effected it. Destiny working with its dull tool, chance, was fashioning out their lives. He did not understand. But it seemed that Augusta understood. So, then, he should not go until he heard her voice calling him. Then there had come the long looked for call of his own country. He had gone gladly back across the ocean and they had at once given him work in the training of student officers. He gave no thought to the commission which might have been his for the asking. He was not looking for the high adventure of war as these boys and men strained toward it. He was heartily sick of war and all that went with it. He had come back to help raise the posse which would put the ramping Beast in pound. When that should be done, and he knew that it would be done quickly and properly, his work would be finished. But first he would see Augusta. He had submitted to his loss of Augusta much as a maimed man submits to the loss of a member. He could undoubtedly live on without Augusta. But it is years before a man, who has, for instance, lost a right arm, can remember that the arm is no longer there. He was forever turning to her mentally, and in every crowded street he saw the sweet girlish figure of Augusta just slipping from sight away from him. He had submitted passively to the decree of fate, or whatever it was that had taken her from him, but the living delight of her presence never left him. It was not memory, nor, in any sense, imagination. It was a fact. In those wonderful months which they had had together, Augusta had not merely lived with him. She had so lived herself into his life that she had become an indefinable, but vital, part of the being that was called Jimmy Wardwell. Without her this Wardwell did not exist. It was out of this feeling of Augusta's persisting presence with him that there grew up in him a conviction. Sometimes it seemed mere impudence. Again it seemed entirely reasonable--reasonable and possible only, of course, in connection with Augusta.