“Well,” he said at length, “I don’t want to preempt the Lord’s prerogative of providing.  But I can’t permit this state of affairs.  I wish you had taken me into your confidence, aunties, when I was a youngster.  However, that doesn’t matter now.  Can you live comfortably on eleven hundred dollars a year?”

Aunt Harriet held up her hands.

“My dear boy,” she said, “such a sum would give us luxuries, us two old women.  But that is out of the question.  If we get five thousand for the place we shall have to live on a great deal less than that.”

“Forget that nonsense about selling this place,” Thompson said roughly.  That grated on him.  He felt a sense of guilt, of responsibility too long neglected.  “Where I’m going I shall be supplied by the government with all I need.  I’ve made some money.  I own war-bonds sufficient to give you eleven hundred a year in interest.  I’ll turn them over to you.  If I come back with a whole skin when the war’s over, I’ll be able to use the capital in a way to provide for all of us.  If I don’t come back, you’ll be secure against want as long as you live.”

He made good his word before his leave was up.  He had very nearly lost faith in the value of money, of any material thing.  He had struggled for money and power for a purpose, to demonstrate that he was a man equal to any man’s struggle.  He had signally failed in his purpose, for reasons that were still a little obscure to him.  Failure had made him a little bitter, bred a pessimism it took the plight of his aunts to cure.  Even if he had failed to achieve his heart’s desire he had acquired power to make two lives content.  Save that it ministered to his self-respect to know that he could win in that fierce struggle of the marketplace, money had lost its high value for him.  Money was only a means, not an end.  But to have it, to be able to bestow it where it was sadly needed, was worth while, after all.  If he “crashed” over there, it was something to have banished the grim spectre of want from these two who were old and helpless.

He was thinking of this along with a jumble of other thoughts as he leaned on the rail of a transport slipping with lights doused out of the port of Halifax.  There was a lump in his throat because of those two old women who had cried over him and clung to him when he left them.  There was another woman on the other side of the continent to whom his going meant nothing, he supposed, save a duty laggardly performed.  And he would have sold his soul to feel her arms around his neck and her lips on his before he went.

“Oh, well,” he muttered to himself as he watched the few harbor lights falling astern, yellow pin-points on the velvety black of the shore,” this is likely to be the finish of that.  I think I’ve burned my last bridge.  And I have learned to stand on my own feet, whether she believes so or not.”

CHAPTER XXVII