He and I were alone in the world. But beside us marched, that May morning, with the glory of youth on his handsome but weak face, one whose "baptism of fire" was to make him a hero, who had else been remembered a coward. The story of the girl he had wronged, and fear of whom had even reconciled his family to his enlisting, was common property, and had been for several seasons. There was a child, too, a little daughter, fondly loved, but unacknowledged, the fame of whose childish beauty many a heedless voice had already sung. He, poor youngster, looked on his all that morning. Once more I saw the flag draped house where his mother waved a brave farewell to him. But there was another later picture in my mind. Again I heard the blare of the band before us as it flung its satire of "The Girl I Left Behind Me," into the spring air. I saw once more in my mind the child, with her floating red gold curls, raised above the crowd on the shoulders of tall men. Her eyes were too young for tears--and for that matter, tears came to her but seldom in later years--and the lips that shouted "bood-bye" smiled, unconscious of bravery, as she swung her hat with its symbolic colors above her shining head. That was the picture that three of us carried to the front. We left him--all his errors redeemed by a noble death--with his face turned up to the stars, as silent, as mysterious as they, after our first battle. From the horrors of that night we two came away bound by an oath to care for that child. * * * * * Again my memory shifted to the days that found her a woman. Fair, beautiful, dainty, her father's daughter in looks, but inheriting from a rare mother a peculiar strength of character, a moral force rarely found with such a temperament and such beauty. We had aided to raise her as became the child of her father, whose story she knew as soon as she was able to understand, but she knew it from the lips of the brave mother, who cherished his memory. Until she was a woman grown it was I, however, who, of her two self-appointed guardians, had watched over her. Children did not interest him. He had married some years before that time, married well with an eye to a calm comfortable future, as became an artist who could not be hampered by the need of money. Indeed, it was not until he knew that I was to marry her that he really looked at her. And I, with all my experience of him, simply because I was never able to understand the dual nature, failed at that fatal hour when we stood together beside our protegee to apply to the situation the knowledge that years of experience should have taught me. I was so bound up in my own feelings that I failed to remember that, until then, I had never had a great emotion that his nature had not acted as a lens in the kindling.