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Updated: May 16, 2025
How on earth did old Benton ever permit you to escape? He wrote me most enthusiastically about you before I ahem left town." "Why didn't you let me know where you were going?" asked Letty with a reproachful simplicity that concentrated Ailsa's amazed attention on her, for she had been looking scornfully at Berkley.
Is he here again?" "Yes," ventured Letty, smiling; "he is escort to your Captain." Ailsa's expression was wintry. Letty, still smiling out of her velvet eyes, looked up confidently into Ailsa's face. "Dear," she said, "I wish you could ever know how nice he is. . . . But I don't believe I could explain " "Nice? Who? Oh, your trooper!" "You don't mistake me, do you?" asked the girl, flushing up.
Ailsa's fair cheeks grew rosy as the evening sky, for the youth was he whom she had wished for, Kenric, the son of the brave Earl Hamish of Bute, and now that he was so near her she felt suddenly timid. He was a lad of sixteen years, not tall, but very thickset and stout built, broad shouldered, deep chested, and strong limbed.
In front of one of the outhouses a tall, bald-headed, jolly-faced civilian stood in his checked shirt sleeves, washing bloody hands in a tin basin. To Ailsa's question he answered: "I'm Dr. Hammond of the Sanitary Commission. Dr. West is in the wards. Very glad you came, Mrs. Paige; very glad, indeed, Miss Lynden.
As Merode put the cold muzzle of the revolver to Ailsa's temple and she ought, one would have supposed, to have been deaf and blind to all things but the horror of her position, one of these strange mental lapses occurred, and her mind, travelling back over the years of her early schooldays, dwelt on a punishment task set her by her preceptress the task of copying three hundred times the phrase "Discretion is the better part of valour."
He could hear Ailsa's screams; he could hear the boy's feeble cries, and a moment later, when the whizzing motor panted up through the moonlight and sped by the broken wall, there was Ailsa, fairly palsied with fright, clinging weakly to the crumbling arch and uttering little sobbing, wordless, incoherent moans of fright as she stared down into the hell of waters; and below, in the foam, a little yellow head was spinning round and round and round, in dizzying circles of torn and leaping waves.
I wrote the date at the top, near the raggedy place where the leaf was torn out of Aunt Ailsa's sketch-book, and then I put, "We be Three Poore Mariners," like the song in "Pan-Pipes."
Then from the choir of white-robed friars there rose the chant of the /Gloria in Excelsis/, swelling full and strong. To Kenric, as he stood by Ailsa's side, the words came with a deep prophetic meaning "Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis."
He could hear Ailsa's screams; he could hear the boy's feeble cries, and a moment later, when the whizzing motor panted up through the moonlight and sped by the broken wall, there was Ailsa, fairly palsied with fright, clinging weakly to the crumbling arch and uttering little sobbing, wordless, incoherent moans of fright as she stared down into the hell of waters; and below, in the foam, a little yellow head was spinning round and round and round, in dizzying circles of torn and leaping waves.
"I have long known that you loved each other," he whispered. "It is a happiness that God sends me as well as you. If it be His will that I do not recover, this makes it easy for me. If He wills it that I live, then, in His infinite mercy, He also gives me the reason for living." Icy cold, Ailsa's hand lay there, limply touching Berkley's; the sick man's eyes were upon them. "Philip!" "Sir?"
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