The Search

The corporal tossed on his hard cot and sighed like a furnace. There ought to be some one to protect her. Someone ought to make her understand what kind of a fellow Wainwright was! She had called him her knight, and a knight's business was to protect, yet what could he do? He could not go to her and tell her that the man she was going to marry was rotten and utterly without moral principle. He could not even send some one else to warn her. Who could he send? His mother? No, his mother would feel shy and afraid of a girl like that. She had always lived a quiet life. He doubted if she would understand herself how utterly unfit a mate Wainwright was for a good pure girl. And there was no one else in the world that he could send. Besides, if she loved the man, and incomprehensible as it seemed, she must love him or why should she marry him?--if she loved him she would not believe an angel from heaven against him. Women were that way; that is, if they were good women, like Ruth. Oh, to think of her tied up to that--beast! He could think of no other word. In his agony he rolled on his face and groaned aloud.

"Oh God!" his soul cried out, "why do such things have to be? If there really is a God why does He let such awful things happen to a pure good girl? The same old bitter question that had troubled the hard young days of his own life. Could there be a God who cared when bitterness was in so many cups? Why had God let the war come?"

Sometime in the night the tumult in his brain and heart subsided and he fell into a profound sleep. The next thing he knew the kindly roughness of his comrades wakened him with shakes and wet sponges flying through the air, and he opened his consciousness to the world again and heard the bugle blowing for roll call. Another day had dawned grayly and he must get up. They set him on his feet, and bantered him into action, and he responded with his usual wit that put them all in howls of laughter, but as he stumbled into place in the line in the five o'clock dawning he realized that a heavy weight was on his heart which he tried to throw off. What did it matter what Ruth Macdonald did with her life? She was nothing to him, never had been and never could be. If only he had not written that letter all would now be as it always had been. If only she had not written her letter! Or no! He put his hand to his breast pocket with a quick movement of protection. Somehow he was not yet ready to relinquish that one taste of bright girl friendliness, even though it had brought a stab in its wake.