The night before they were to sail, he came to say good-bye.  The war had at last begun in earnest; men were falling, and the Spaniards were expected to make a desperate and bloody resistance.  It was a sobering moment for everyone, and, in all voices, however hard they tried to make them brave and gay, there ran an undercurrent of solemnity.  Howard and Raymond were to be actors in that terrible drama not yet played; stripped and powder-blackened at their guns, they were perhaps doomed to go down with their ship and find their graves in the Caribbean.  Before them lay untold possibilities of wounds and mutilation, of disease, suffering, and horror.  What woman that knew them could look on unmoved at the sight of these men, so grave and earnest, so quietly resolute, so deprecatory of anything like braggadocio or over-confidence?  It filled Christine Latimer with a fierce pride in herself and them; in a race that could breed men so gentle and so brave; in a country that was founded so surely on the devoted hearts of its citizens.

She was crying as Raymond came to her later on the same evening, and found her sitting in the far end of the drawing-room with the lights turned low.  They were alone together, for the quartermaster had left Howard with his mother and his brothers gathered in a farewell group about the library fire.  Miss Latimer took both of Raymond’s hands, and, with no attempt to disguise her sorrow, drew him close beside her on the divan.  She was overflowing with pity for this poor fellow, whose life had been so hard, in which until now there had neither been love nor friends, whose only human tie was to his mother and to her.  Had he known it, he might have put his arms about her and kissed her tear-swollen eyes and drawn her head against his breast.  She was filled with a pent-up tenderness for him; a word, and she would have discovered what was until then inarticulate in her bosom.  But the tall quartermaster was withheld from such incredible presumption.  Her beautiful gown against his common serge typified, as it were, the gulf between them.  Her distress, her agitation, were in his mind due to her concern for Howard Quintan; and he told her again and again, with manly sincerity, that he would take good care of her boy.

She knew he loved her.  It had been plain to her for weeks past.  She knew every thought in his head as he sat there beside her, thrilled with the touch of her hands, and in the throes of a respectful rapture.  Again and again the avowal was on his lips; he longed to tell her how dear she was to him; it would be hard to die with that unsaid, were he to be amongst those who never returned.  It never occurred to him that she might return his love.  A woman like her!  A queen!

She could easily have helped him out.  More than once she was on the point of doing so.  But the woman in her rebelled at the thought of taking what was the man’s place.  She had something of the exaggerated delicacy of an old maid.  It was for him to ask, for her to answer; and the precious moments slipped away.  At last, greatly daring, he managed to blurt out the fact that he wanted to ask a favour.