"Myra, I would have given my whole life to have had that minute over again. And it was maddening to know that the business might have been done all right with any old fuse. Only we were so keen over our new ideas for signalling, and our portable electric apparatus. Oh, good Lord! I knew despair, those days and nights! I was down with fever, and they took away my sword, and guns, and razors. I couldn't imagine why. Even despair doesn't take me that way. But if a chap could have come into my tent and said: 'You didn't kill Ingleby after all. He's all right and alive!' I would have given my life gladly for that moment's relief. But no present anguish can undo a past mistake. "Well, I pulled through the fever; life had to be lived, and I suppose I'm not the sort of chap to take a morbid view. When I found the thing was to be kept quiet; when the few who knew the ins-and-outs stood by me like the good fellows they were, saying it might have happened to any of them, and as soon as I got fit again I should see the only rotten thing would be to let it spoil my future; I made up my mind to put it clean away, and live it down. You know they say, out in the great western country: 'God Almighty hates a quitter.' It is one of the stimulating tenets of their fine practical theology. I had fought through other hard times. I determined to fight through this. I succeeded so well, that it even seemed natural to go on with the work Ingleby and I had been doing together, and carry it through. And when notes of his were needed, I came to his own home without a qualm, to ask his widow--the woman I, by my mistake, had widowed--for permission to have and to use them. "I came--my mind full of the rich joy of life and love, with scarcely room for a passing pang of regret, as I entered the house without a master, the home without a head, knowing I was about to meet the woman I had widowed. Truly 'The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.' I had thrown off too easily what should have been a lifelong burden of regret. "In the woman I had widowed I found--the woman I was about to wed! Good God! Was there ever so hard a retribution?"