“But why punish me?” she protested.  “Do I want the war?  Do I want to free Cuba?  No!  I want you, and if you go, you are the one who is sure to be killed.  You are so big—­and so brave, and you will be rushing in wherever the fighting is, and then—­then you will die.”  She raised her eyes and looked at him as though seeing him from a great distance.  “And,” she added fatefully, “I will die, too, or maybe I will have to live, to live without you for years, for many miserable years.”

Fearfully, with great caution, as though in his joy in her he might crush her in his hands, the young man drew her to him and held her close.  After a silence he whispered.  “But, you know that nothing can happen to me.  Not now, that God has let me love you.  He could not be so cruel.  He would not have given me such happiness to take it from me.  A man who loves you, as I love you, cannot come to any harm.  And the man you love is immortal, immune.  He holds a charmed life.  So long as you love him, he must live.”

The eyes of the girl smiled up at him through her tears.  She lifted her lips to his.  “Then you will never die!” she said.

She held him away from her.  “Listen!” she whispered.  “What you say is true.  It must be true, because you are always right.  I love you so that nothing can harm you.  My love will be a charm.  It will hang around your neck and protect you, and keep you, and bring you back to me.  When you are in danger my love will save you.  For, while it lives, I live.  When it dies—­”

Chesterton kissed her quickly.

“What happens then,” he said, “doesn’t matter.”

The war game had run its happy-go-lucky course briefly and brilliantly, with “glory enough for all,” even for Chesterton.  For, in no previous campaign had good fortune so persistently stood smiling at his elbow.  At each moment of the war that was critical, picturesque, dramatic, by some lucky accident he found himself among those present.  He could not lose.  Even when his press boat broke down at Cardenas, a Yankee cruiser and two Spanish gun-boats, apparently for his sole benefit, engaged in an impromptu duel within range of his megaphone.  When his horse went lame, the column with which he had wished to advance, passed forward to the front unmolested, while the rear guard, to which he had been forced to join his fortune, fought its way through the stifling underbrush.

Between his news despatches, when he was not singing the praises of his fellow-countrymen, or copying lists of their killed and wounded, he wrote to Miss Armitage.  His letters were scrawled on yellow copy paper and consisted of repetitions of the three words, “I love you,” rearranged, illuminated, and intensified.

Each letter began much in the same way.  “The war is still going on.  You can read about it in the papers.  What I want you to know is that I love you as no man ever—­” And so on for many pages.