“Sometimes I query, too, whether my love for Margaret had that flame-like quality which characterizes her love for her husband.  Margaret has always been so much a part of my life that my love for her began I could not tell when, and grew and strengthened with the years.  There never has been any other woman but Margaret in my life.  Even if I should ever come out of this living hell, which I doubt, I do not believe there ever will be another.

“And yet—­”

“I have just been summoned for duty.  Good-by, dear friend, until the next time.  Lovingly yours, Jack Bickett.”

I laid the letter aside with a queer little startled feeling at my heart.

Those two little words, “and yet,” at the end of Jack’s letter gave me much food for thought.  Was it possible that before his death Jack had realized that his love for me was not the consuming passion he had thought it, but partook more of the fraternal affection that I had had for him?

I hoped for Jack’s sake that this was so.

“And yet—­”

I ran through the rest of the letters rapidly.  One, the third from the last, arrested my attention sharply.

“Such a pleasant thing happened to me today,” Jack wrote, “one of the unexpected gleams of sunlight that are so much brighter because of the general gloom against which they are reflected.

“I was given a week’s furlough last Saturday and went up to Paris with my friend, Paul Caillard.  He had a friend in a hospital on the way there, headed by Dr. Braithwaite, the celebrated surgeon of Detroit.”

I caught my breath.  As well as if I had already read the words, I knew what was coming.

“At an unexpected turn in the corridor I almost knocked over a little nurse who was hurrying toward the office.  She looked up at me startled, out of the prettiest brown eyes I ever saw, and then stopped, staring at me as if I had been a ghost.  I stared back, frankly, for her face was familiar to me, although for the moment I could not tell where I had seen her before.

“Then, half-shyly, she spoke, and her voice matched her eyes.

“‘You are Mr. Bickett, are you not, Mrs. Graham’s cousin?’

“For a moment I did not realize that ‘Mrs. Graham’ was Margaret.  But that gave me no clue to the identity of the girl.  Then all at once it came to me.

“‘I know you now,’ I said.  ’You are Mark Earle’s little sister, Katherine.’”

So they had met at last, Jack Bickett, my brother-cousin, and Katherine Sonnot, the little nurse who had taken care of my mother-in-law, and whom I had learned to love as a dear friend.

Was I glad or sorry, I wondered, as I picked up Jack’s letter again that I had crushed any feeling I might have had in the matter, and had spoken the word to Dr. Braithwaite that resulted in Katharine’s joining the eminent surgeon’s staff of nurses?  It seemed a pity to have these two meet only to be torn apart so soon by death.