Sometimes he took Jean with him, but not always. "There are places that I don't like to have you go, my dear, but those are where I get my men." At other times when he came out to where she sat in the car there would flash before his eyes the vision of his wife's face, as she, too, had once sat there, waiting-- Sometimes he took the children, and rode with them on a slow-moving barge from one lock to another, with the limousine meeting them at the end. So he travelled the old paths, innocently, as he might have travelled them throughout the years. Yet if he thought of those difficult years, he said never a word. He felt, perhaps, that there was nothing to say. He took to himself no credit for the things he was doing. If age and infirmity had brought to him a realization of all that he had missed, he was surely not to be praised for doing that which was, obviously, his duty. Yet it gave him a new zest for life, and left Jean freer than she had been before. It left her, too, without the fear of him, which had robbed their relationship of all sense of security. "You see, I never knew," she wrote in her memory book, "what might happen. I had visions of myself going after him in the night as Derry had gone and his mother. I used to dream about it, and dread it." Yet she had said nothing of her dread to Derry in her smiling letters, and as men think of women, he had thought of her in the sick room as a guardian angel, shining and serene. * * * * * * And now, faint and far came to the men in the cantonments the sound of battles across the sea. The bugles calling them each morning seemed to say, "Soon, soon, you will go, you will go, you will go--" To Derry, listening, it seemed the echo of the fairy trumpets, "_Trutter-a-trutt, trutter-a-trutt, you will go, you will go, you will go--_" It was strange how the thought of it drew him, drew him as even the thoughts of Jean his bride did not draw--. He remembered that years ago he had smiled with a tinge of tolerant sophistication over the old lines: "I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more--" Yet here it was, a truth in his own life. A woman meaning more to him than she could ever have meant in times of peace, because he could go forth to fight for her, his life at stake, for her. It was for her, and for other women that his sword was unsheathed.