ment took no part in the fighting -- if there's really
going to be fighting?"

Rose Otway stopped short. She felt a most curious
sensation of fatigue; it was as though she had been
speaking an hour instead of a few moments. But
she had put her whole heart, her whole soul, into those
few simple words.

There was a long, long pause, and her eyes filled
with tears. Those who knew her would have told
you that Rose Otway was quite singularly self-possessed
and unemotional. In fact she could not
remember when she had cried last, it was so long ago.
But now there came over her a childish, irresistible
desire to have her way -- to save poor, poor Jervis from
himself. And suddenly the face of the young man
looking at her became transfigured.

"Rose," he cried -- "Rose, do you really care, a
little, what happens to me? Oh, if you only knew
what a difference that would make!"

And then she pulled herself together. Jervis
mustn't become what she in her own mind called
"silly." Young men, ay, and older men too, had a
way of becoming "silly" about Rose Otway. And
up to now she had disliked it very much. But this
afternoon she was touched rather than displeased.

"I care very much," she said quietly. She knew
the battle was won, and it was very collectedly that
she added the words, "Now, I have your promise,
Jervis? You're not to do anything foolish----"
Then she saw she had made a mistake. "No, no!"
she cried hastily; "I don't mean that -- I don't mean
that a man who becomes a soldier in time of war is
doing anything foolish! But I do think that you

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v?