Late in March Dan Appleton went to the front, taking with him his wife and his sister, for whom O’Neil had thoughtfully prepared suitable living-quarters.  The girls were as hungry as Dan to have a part in the deciding struggle, or at least to see it close at hand, for the spirit of those engaged in the work had entered them also.  Life at Omar of late had been rather uneventful, and they looked forward with pleasure to a renewal of those companionable relations which had made the summer months so, full of interest and delight.  But they were disappointed.  Life at the end of the line they found to be a very grim, a very earnest, and in some respects an extremely disagreeable affair:  the feverish, unceasing activity of their friends left no time for companionship or recreation of any sort.  More and more they, too, came to feel the sense of haste and strain pervading the whole army of workers, the weight of responsibility that bore upon the commander.

Dan became almost a stranger to them, and when they saw him he was obsessed by vital issues.  Mellen was gruff and irritable:  Parker in his preoccupation ignored everything but his duties.  Of all their former comrades O’Neil alone seemed aware of their presence.  But behind his smile they saw the lurking worries; in his eyes was an abstraction they could not penetrate, in his bearing the fatigue of a man tried to the breaking-point.

To Eliza there was a certain joy merely in being near the man she loved, even though she could not help being hurt by his apparent indifference.  The long weeks without sight of him had deepened her feeling, and she had turned for relief to the writing of her book—­the natural outlet for her repressed emotions.  Into its pages she had poured all her passion, all her yearning, and she had written with an intimate understanding of O’Neil’s ambitions and aims which later gave the story its unique success as an epic of financial romance.

Hers was a nature which could not be content with idleness.  She took up the work that she and Natalie had begun, devoting herself unobtrusively yet effectively to making O’Neil comfortable.  It was a labor of love, done with no expectation of reward; it thrilled her, filling her with mingled sadness and satisfaction.  But if Murray noticed the improvement in his surroundings, which she sometimes doubted, he evidently attributed it to a sudden access of zeal on the part of Ben, for he made no comment.  Whether or not she wished him to see and understand she could hardly tell.  Somehow his unobservant, masculine acceptance of things better and worse appealed to the woman in her.  She slipped into O’Neil’s quarters during his absence, and slipped out again quietly; she learned to know his ways, his peculiarities; she found herself caressing and talking to his personal belongings as if they could hear and understand.  She conducted long conversations with the objects on his bureau.  One morning Ben entered unexpectedly to surprise her in the act of kissing Murray’s shaving-mirror as if it still preserved the image of its owner’s face, after which she banished the cook-boy utterly and performed his duties with her own hands.