Lightly he told Leslie the bare details of his wound. It had been in a field of beet that he had been pipped; when he had been seeing to some barbed wire with a sergeant and a couple of his men, at nightfall. One of those snipers had got him.
"And I was downed in a second," he said ruefully. "I couldn't get the beggar!"
Leslie thought of the young, mortally-wounded Mercutio and his impatient cry of "What! Is he gone, and hath nothing?" It was the only complaint at his lot that was ever to pass the lips of this other fighter.
She looked at him, and her heart swelled with pride for him. It sank with shame for herself. She had always held him—well, not as lightly as she said she had. There had been always the sneaking tenderness for the tall, infatuated boy whom she'd laughed at. But why "sneaking"? Why had she laughed? She had thought him so much less than herself. She said she knew so much more. What vanity and crass, superficial folly! A new thrill took her suddenly. Could it be that War, that had cut everybody's life in two, had worked another wonder?
Presently he remarked, "I say, your friends, the poor Dampiers! I suppose nothing's ever been heard of them, after that day that they found out at the Works that his wife had started with him, when he set off for France, and disappeared?"
"Nothing," said Leslie quietly, "Whether it was an accident with his new engine, or whether they were killed by a shot from a German aeroplane they met, we shan't ever know now. It must have been over the sea.... Nothing has ever been found. Much the best way, I think. I said so to poor young Mr. Ryan, the man who let her take his place. He was beside himself when he turned up at the Aircraft place again and found that nothing had been heard. He said he'd killed her. I told him she would think he'd done more for her than anybody she knew. The best time to go out! No growing old and growing dull and perhaps growing ill and being kept half alive by bothering doctors, for years.... No growing out of love with each other, ever! They, at least, have had something that nothing can spoil."
Monty Scott, turning his small, close-cropped head of a soldier and his white face towards the tapestry, blurted out: "Well! At all events they've had it. But even having it 'spoilt' is better than never having had any——"
He checked himself abruptly.
He was not going to whine now over his own ill-luck in love to her, to Leslie, who had turned him down three times. Not much.
In the suddenly tense atmosphere of the little room overlooking the wide, dim Square, the girl felt the young man's resolution—a resolution that he would keep. He would never ask her for another favour.