While busy with her ablutions the two new nurses arrived, seated on a battery limber; and, hastily drying her hands, she went to them and welcomed them, gave them tea and breakfast in Dr. West’s office, and left them there while she went away to awake Celia and Letty, pack her valise for the voyage before her, and write to Berkley.

But it was not until she saw the sun low in the west from the deck of the Mary Lane, that she at last found a moment to write.

The place, the hour, her loneliness, moved depths in her that she had never sounded—­moved her to a recklessness never dreamed of.  It was an effort for her to restrain the passionate confessions trembling on her pen’s tip; her lips whitened with the cry struggling for utterance.

“Dear, never before did I so completely know myself, never so absolutely trust myself to the imperious, almost ungovernable tide which has taken my destiny from the quiet harbour where it lay, and which is driving it headlong toward yours.

“You have left me alone, to wonder and to wonder.  And while isolated, I stand trying to comprehend why it was that your words separated our destinies while your arms around me made them one.  I am perfectly aware that the surge of life has caught me up, tossed me to its crest, and is driving me blindly out across the waste spaces of the world toward you—­wherever you may be—­whatever be the cost.  I will not live without you.

“I am not yet quite sure what has so utterly changed me—­what has so completely changed within me.  But I am changed.  Perhaps daily familiarity with death and pain and wretchedness, hourly contact with the paramount mystery of all, has broadened me, or benumbed me.  I don’t know.  All I seem to see clearly—­to clearly understand—­is the dreadful brevity of life, the awful chances against living, the miracle of love in such a maelstrom, the insanity of one who dare not confess it, live for it, love to the uttermost with heart, soul, and body, while life endures,

“All my instincts, all principles inherent or inculcated; all knowledge spiritual and intellectual, acquired; all precepts, maxims, proverbs, axioms incorporated and lately a part of me, seem trivial, empty, meaningless in sound and in form compared to the plain truths of Death.  For never until now did I understand that we walk always arm in arm with Death, that he squires us at every step, coolly joggles our elbow, touches our shoulder now and then, wakes us at dawn, puts out our night-light, and smooths the sheets we sleep under.

“I had thought of Death as something hiding very, very far away.  Yet I had already seen him enter my own house.  But now I understand how close he always is; and, somehow, it has changed—­hardened, maybe—­much that was vague and unformed in my character.  And, maybe, the knowledge is distorting it; I don’t know.  All I know is that, before life ends, if there is a chance of fulfilment, I will take it.  And fulfilment means you—­my love for you, the giving of it, of myself, of all I am, all I desire, all I care for, all I believe, into your keeping—­into your embrace.  That, for me, is fulfilment of life.