She got up from her chair and went to the dressing-table. There she took up with a trembling hand a little ivory case, and going back to her seat she opened it reverently and looked at the face of her boy husband. There he was in all the bloom of his twenty and six years. It was a young pleasant face. And he had been such a comrade of her childhood and girlhood. But strangely enough he had never seen the gulf widening between them as she grew into a woman older than her years and he into a man, young for his years; boyish in his view of life, mentally immature. He was quite unconscious that he never met the deeper wants of her nature; those depths meant nothing to him. There had been a tacit understanding between them from their childhood that they should marry; an understanding encouraged by their parents. When at last May found out her mistake; that this bondage was irksome and her heart unsatisfied, he had suddenly thrown the responsibility of his happiness, of his very life, upon her shoulders, not by threats of vengeance on himself, but by falling from his usual buoyant cheerfulness into a state of uncomplaining despondency. May had had more than her share of men's admiration. Her piquancy and ready sympathy more even than her good looks attracted them. But she had gone on her way heart whole, and meanwhile she could not endure to see her old comrade unhappy. They became formally engaged and he returned to his old careless cheerfulness. He was no longer a pathetic object, and she was a little disappointed and yet ashamed of her disappointment. Why should she have vague "wants" in her nature--these luxuries of the pampered soul? The face she now gazed upon, figured in the little ivory frame, was of a man, not over-wise, a man who was occupied with the enjoyment of life, yet without sinister motives. During those brief six months of married life, he had leant upon her, delighted and yet amused at her sterner virtues; and yet this man, not strong, not wise, when the call of duty came, when that ancient call to manhood, the call to rise up and meet the enemy, when that call came, he went out not shrinking, but with all honourable eagerness and fearlessness to offer his life. And his life was taken. So that he whom in life she had never looked to for moral help, had become to her--in death--something sacred and unapproachable. In her first fresh grief she had asked herself bitterly what she--in her young womanhood--had ever offered to humanity? Nothing at all comparable to his sacrifice! Had she ever offered anything at all? Had she not, from girlhood, taken all the joys that life put in her way, and taken them for granted?