her, leaving her and her modest matrimonial proposals scorned and rejected!  For shame, Sir!  I’ve a good mind to come and complain to your Colonel and ask him to make you keep your solemn promises and marry me....

“Now look here, darling, nonsense aside—­I solemnly swear that if you don’t buy yourself out of the army on the day I come of age (or before, if you will, and can) I will really come and make you marry me and I will live with you as a soldier’s wife.  If you persist in your wrong-headed notion of being a ‘disgrace’ (you!) then we’ll just adopt the army as a career, and we’ll go through all the phases till you get a Commission.  I hope you won’t take this course—­but if you do, you’ll be a second Hector Macdonald and retire as Lieutenant-General Sir Damocles de Warrenne (K.C.B., K.C.M.G., K.C.S.I., D.S.O., and, of course, V.C.), having confessed to an alias.  It will be a long time before we should be in really congenial society, that way, darling, but I’m sure I should enjoy every hour of it with you, so long as I felt I was a comfort and happiness to you.  And when you got your Commission I should not be a social drag upon you as sometimes happens.  Nor before it should I be a nuisance and hindrance to you and make you wish you were ‘shut of the curse of a soldier’.  I could ‘rough it’ as well as you and, besides, there would be no ‘roughing it’ where you were, for me.  It is here that I am ‘roughing it,’ sitting impotent and wondering what is happening to you, and whether that terrible illness ever seizes you, and whether you are properly looked after when it does.

“Now, just realize, dearest Dam—­I said I would wait twenty years for you, if necessary.  I would and I will, but don’t make me do it, darling.  Realize how happy I should be if I could only come and sew and cook and scrub and work for you.  Can you understand that life is only measurable in terms of happiness and that my happiness can only be where you, are?  If you weren’t liable to these seizures I could bear to wait, but as it is, I can’t.  I beg and beseech you not to make me wait till I am of age, Dam.  There’s no telling what may happen to you and I just can’t bear it. I’m coming, if I don’t hear from you, and I can easily do something to compel you to marry me, if I come.  You are not going to bear this alone, darling, so don’t imagine it.  We’re not going to keep separate shops after all these years, just because you’re ill with a trouble of some kind that fools can’t understand.

“Now write to me at once and put me in a position to write to you in the ordinary way—­or look out for me!  I’m all ready to run away, all sorts of useful things packed—­ready to come and be a soldier’s girl.

“You know that I do what I think I’ll do—­you spoke of my ’steel-straight directness and sweet brave will’ in the poem you were making about me,