The next day Lee received from the War Department a telegram
directing him to "proceed without delay" to San Francisco, and
there to embark for the Philippines.

That night he put the question to her directly, but again she
shook her head unhappily; again she said: "I don't know!"

So he sailed without her, and each evening at sunset, as the
great transport heaved her way across the swell of the Pacific,
he stood at the rail and looked back. With the aid of the first
officer he calculated the difference in time between a whaling
village situated at forty-four degrees north and an army
transport dropping rapidly toward the equator, and so, each day,
kept in step with the girl he loved.

"Now," he would tell himself, "she is in her cart in front of the
post-office, and while they sort the morning mail she gossips
with the fisher folks, the summer folks, the grooms, and
chauffeurs. Now she is sitting for her portrait to Stedman" (he
did not dwell long on that part of her day), "and now she is at
tennis, or, as she promised, riding alone at sunset down our lost
road through the woods."

But that part of her day from which Lee hurried was that part
over which the girl herself lingered. As he turned his eyes from
his canvas to meet hers, Stedman, the charming, the deferential,
the adroit, who never allowed his painting to interrupt his talk,
told her of what he was pleased to call his dreams and ambitions,
of the great and beautiful ladies who had sat before his easel,
and of the only one of them who had given him inspiration.