But Patsy and Ralph, looking at each other wisely, knew better. The war--why, what had the war to do with their love? Already the world-old conviction of true lovers submerged all history. Since time began they were destined for one another, and neither war nor pestilence could have kept them apart. As Ralph demanded, so it was. Four days later there was a wedding at the farm--a wedding so simple that Mother McCullon was shocked. Both Ralph and Patsy would have it so. "We have no time for fussing, Mother," the autocratic young man had declared, and Patsy was as little concerned. She was going with him. She would find a home as near his camp as practical. She would stay there as long as practical. To make this possible without too great inconvenience to those with whom she worked in school and town, seemed vastly more important than a wedding. Were not these war times? But a sweeter wedding never was, so Dick and Nancy and Mary and Tom Sabins and the half dozen other friends invited said. Everybody was so happy, everybody so proud, everybody so sure. "It isn't often that I marry two people," so Dick said to Nancy as they drove back from the station where they said good-by to the pair, "without some inward doubts. I haven't a shadow about Patsy and Ralph. They will work it out." And Nancy said confidently, "I am sure of it." Glad as he was for his friends, their marriage and Ralph's enlistment threw Dick back again into a black and hopeless mood. If he could ease the pain of his longing for Nancy by getting into the war! If he could ease his despair from the sentence to inaction by possessing Nancy! He felt that he was one condemned to eternal loneliness and eternal rust. More powerfully than ever, as in the distant day when he had sought Annie and found her dead--or when in August of 1914 he had sought to make his way into the British Army and had been thrust back, he was flooded with the conviction that he was doomed never to know the great realities of life. Not a little of his ache came from the stir that Ralph's almost primitive attitude toward the war had given him. Ralph, once convinced that the future of the world was at stake, that it was at bottom a struggle between men's freedom and slavery, that the event could only be settled by war, had undergone a startling change in feeling. He was seized with a passion for the struggle. He wanted to fight--fight with weapons--with his hands--get at the very throat of this enemy of men who had so long masqueraded in his mind as their friend. It was his thirst for battle that had made him enlist in the ranks. When Dick had first heard of this decision he had questioned its wisdom. "Why, Ralph," he said, "you ought to go into an officers' camp. You'll be needed there."