“Ian, I feel it on my own heart, and I want it lifted away.  Your letter has only one word in it really.  That word is Finis.  I say, it must not, shall not, be Finis.  Look at the escapes you have had in this war.  Is not that enough to prove that you have a long way to go yet, and that you have to ‘make good’ the veld as you trek.  To outspan now would be a crime.  It would spoil a great life, it would darken memory—­even mine, Ian.  I must speak the truth.  I want you, we all want you, to be the big man you are at heart.  Do not be a Lassalle.  It is too small.  If one must be a slave, then let it be to something greater than one’s self, higher—­toweringly unattainably higher.  Believe me, neither the girl you love nor any woman on earth is entitled to hold in slavery the energies and the mind and hopes of a man who can do big things—­or any man at all.

“Ian, Tynie and I have our trials, but we are going to live them down.  At first Tynie wanted to die, but he soon said he would see it through—­blind at forty.  You have had your trials, you have them still; but every gift of man is yours, and every opportunity.  Will you not live it all out to the end?  Allah knows the exit He wants for us, and He must resent our breaking a way out of the prison of our own making.

“You’ve no idea how this life of work with Jasmine has brought things home to me—­and to Jasmine too.  When I see the multitude of broken and maimed victims of war, well, I feel like Jeremiah; but I feel sad too that these poor fellows and those they love must suffer in order to teach us our lesson—­us and England.  Dear old friend, great man, I am going to quote a verse Tynie read to me last night—­oh, how strange that seems!  Yet it was so in a sense, he did read to me.  Tynie made me say the words from the book, but he read into them all that they were, he that never drew a literary breath.  It was a poem Jasmine quoted to him a fortnight ago—­Browning’s ‘Grammarian,’ and he stopped me at these words: 

“’Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: 
Wait ye the warning? 
Our low life was the level’s and the night’s;
He’s for the morning.’

“Tynie stopped me there, and said, ’That’s Stafford.  He’s the Alpine fellow!’ . . .”

A few sentences more and then the letter ended on a note of courage, solicitude and friendship.  And at the very last she said: 

“It isn’t always easy to find the key to things, but you will find it, not because you are so clever, but because at heart you are so good....  We both send our love, and don’t forget that England hasn’t had a tenth of her share of Ian Stafford....”

Then there followed a postscript which ran: 

“I always used to say, ‘When my ship comes home,’ I’d have this or that.  Well, here is the ship—­mine and Jasmine’s, and it has come Home for me, and for Jasmine, too, I hope.”

Stafford looked out over the veld.  He saw the light of the sun, the joy of summer, the flowers, the buoyant hills, where all the guns were silent now; he saw a blesbok in the distance leaping to join its fellows of a herd which had strayed across the fields of war; he felt that stir of vibrant life in the air which only the new lands know; and he raised his head with the light of resolve growing in his eyes.