Jeannette seemed to swallow her heart as she climbed over the rail.  The Highlanders were all in the boat except their colonel.  He drew in his breath with a startled sound, and she knew the sweep of her skirt must have betrayed her.  She expected to fall into the river; but her hand took sure hold of a ladder of rope, and, creeping down backward, she set her foot in the bateau.  It was a large and steady open boat.  Some of the men were standing.  She had entered the bow, and as Colonel Fraser dropped in they cast off, and she sat down, finding a bench as she had found foothold.  The Highland officer was beside her.  They could not see each other’s faces.  She was not sure he had detected her.  The hardihood which had taken her beyond the French lines in search of on whom she felt under her protection was no longer in her.  A cowering woman with a boatload of English soldiers palpitated under the darkness.  It was necessary only to steer; both tide and current carried them steadily down.  On the surface of the river, lines of dark objects followed.  A fleet of the enemy’s transports was moving towards Quebec.

To most women country means home.  Jeannette was tenaciously fond of the gray old city of Quebec, but home to her was to be near that Highland officer.  Her humiliation passed into the very agony of tenderness.  To go wherever he was going was enough.  She did not want him to speak to her, or touch her, or give any sign that he knew she was in the world.  She wanted to sit still by his side under the negation of darkness and be satisfied.  Jeannette had never dreamed how long the hours between turn of tide and dawn may be.  They were the principal part of her life.

Keen stars held the sky at immeasurable heights.  There was no mist.  The chill wind had swept the river clear like a great path.  Within reach of Jeannette’s hand, but hidden from her, as most of us are hidden from one another, sat one more solitary than herself.  He had not her robust body.  Disease and anxiety had worn him away while he was hopelessly besieging Quebec.  In that last hour before the 13th of September dawned, General Wolfe was groping down river toward one of the most desperate military attempts in the history of the world.

There was no sound but the rustle of the water, the stir of a foot as some standing man shifted his weight, and the light click of metal as guns in unsteady hands touched barrels.  A voice, modulating rhythm which Jeannette could not understand, began to speak.  General Wolfe was reciting an English poem.  The strain upon his soul was more than he could bear, and he relieved it by those low-uttered rhymes.  Jeannette did not know one word of English.  The meaning which reached her was a dirge, but a noble dirge; the death hymn of a human being who has lived up to his capacities.  She felt strangely influenced, as by the neighborhood of some large angel, and at the same time the tragedy of being alive overswept her.  For one’s duty is never all done; or when we have accomplished it with painstaking care, we are smitten through with finding that the greater things have passed us by.