"Believe me, Peter dear, it all matters so little, this trouble and
unhappiness that you've had, if you take it bravely. The courage that
you've wanted before is nothing to the courage that you want now if you're
going back. Let me die knowing that we're both going back.
"Think of what your life, if it's fine enough, can mean to other people.
Go back to be battered--never mind what happens to your body--any one can
stand that. There's London waiting for you, there's life and adventure and
hardship. There are people to be helped. You'll go, with all that I can
give you, behind you ... you'll go, Peter?"
He sat with his teeth set, staring out into the world. He had known from
the first sentence of her appeal to him that she had named the one thing
that could give him courage to fight his cowardice. Some one had once said:
"If any one soul of us is all the world, this world and the next, to any
other soul, then whoever it may be that thus loves us, the inadequacy of
our return, the hopeless debt of us, must strike us to our knees with an
utter humility."
So did he feel now. Out of the wreck there had survived this one thing.
He remembered what Henry Galleon had once said about Fortitude, that the
hardest trial of all to bear was the consciousness of having missed the
Finest Thing. All these years she had been there by the side of him and he
had scarcely thought of her--now, even as he watched her, she was slipping
away from him, and soon he would be left alone with the consciousness of
missing the greatest chance of his life.
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