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.

From her only one of the letters she wrote reached him.  It was picked up in the sand at Siboney after the medical corps, in an effort to wipe out the yellow-fever, had set fire to the post-office tent.

She had written it some weeks before from her summer home at Newport, and in it she said:  “When you went to the front, I thought no woman could love more than I did then.  But, now I know.  At least I know one girl who can.  She cannot write it.  She can never tell you.  You must just believe.

“Each day I hear from you, for as soon as the paper comes, I take it down to the rocks and read your cables, and I look south across the ocean to Cuba, and try to see you in all that fighting and heat and fever.  But I am not afraid.  For each morning I wake to find I love you more; that it has grown stronger, more wonderful, more hard to bear.  And I know the charm I gave you grows with it, and is more powerful, and that it will bring you back to me wearing new honors, ’bearing your sheaves with you.’