There was not the slightest doubt of Lucy’s consent in Mr. Leslie’s words, and there was no longer any fear or shrinking in the hazel eyes from which Lucy shook the tears before she met his gaze. While he spoke she had buried her face in her hands, and the promise, made when Bob came out of German captivity, never again to give way to despair, seemed suddenly very hard to keep. But she stopped trembling and sat erect. For months she had breathed the atmosphere of brave endurance. Now the thought uppermost in her mind was this, “I must think only of Father. How we can get to him most quickly.” Aloud she asked, “When do we start, Cousin Henry?”

“You’re a brick!” said Mr. Leslie, but under his breath, for his own voice would not obey him just then, at sight of Lucy’s pale and tear-stained face. He managed to say, “We must leave here by seven o’clock.”

The next two hours seemed all one hurried flight to Lucy, with dinner forced upon her, which she choked down somehow, and Cousin Henry and Janet hovering about her with hopeful words and tender, sympathetic hands, and eyes that would fill up with tears in spite of them. Then hurried farewells, and the train that drew up in the gloom of the little station. After that came the long ride to Dover. It was not more than a few hours, but to Lucy it was endless.

It seemed to her that days already had gone by, when in the darkness of the first hours of the morning she felt beneath her feet the gangway of the ship that was to carry them across the channel. And here for a moment she forgot her surroundings and stood on the wind-swept deck, silent and motionless. All at once she seemed to have come very close to the great battle-field, for, borne through the misty darkness, she heard, for the first time clearly audible, the distant thunder of the guns.

The water was whipped into choppy waves by the shifting wind, and Lucy, standing by the cabin window at Mr. Leslie’s side, saw the dim lights of Dover bob up and down as the ship got under way. The cabin and decks were crowded with people, officers and men returning to duty from brief leaves at home, as well as a number of nurses and women war workers of various kinds. More than one of these cast a friendly, pitying glance in Lucy’s direction, but they were strangers to her, and she could not so much as return their smiles just then. The courage she had so resolutely summoned up at Highland House was fast sinking. She dropped down in the chair Mr. Leslie offered her in a secluded corner, and, sheltered by the darkness enforced by lurking submarines, buried her face in her hands 

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