"Yes; but—I say, it doesn't matter one scrap, thanks," declared Monty Scott, very hoarsely.
This was the hardest thing he'd ever yet had to bear; harder than lying out wounded in that wet beetroot-field for nine hours before he could be picked up; harder than the pain, the agonising, jolting journeys; harder even than the sleepless nights when he had tossed and turned on his bed, next to the bed where a delirious man who had won the D.S.O. cried out in his nightmare unceasingly: "Stick it, boys! Stick it, boys! Stick it, boys!" He (Monty) didn't think he could stick this. There could never be any one in the world but Leslie for him, that laughing, devil-may-care Leslie at whom "nice" girls looked askance. Leslie who didn't care. Leslie who pitied him! Ghastly! Desperately he wished she'd get up and go—go——
Suddenly her voice sounded in his ear. Far from being pitying it was so petulant as to convince even him. It cried: "Monty! I said then that you were an infant-in-arms! If you weren't an infant you could see!"
He turned his head quickly on the couch-cushion. But even then he didn't really see. Even then he scarcely took in, for the moment, what he heard.
For the kneeling, radiant girl had to go on, laughing shakily: "I always liked you.... After everything I said! After everything I've thought, it comes round to this. It's better to have loved and settled down than never to have loved at all.... Oh! I've got my head into as bright a rainbow as any of them!..." scolded Leslie, laughing again as flutteringly as Paul Ðampier's sweetheart might have done. "Oh, I thought that just because one liked a man in the kind of way I liked you, it was no reason to accept him ... fool that I was——"
"Leslie!" he cried very sharply, scarcely believing his ears. "Could you have?—could you? And you tell me now! When it's too late——"
"Too late? Won't you have me? Can't you see that I think you so much more of a man when you're getting about as well as you can on one leg than I did when you were just dancing and fooling about on two? As for me——"
She turned her bright face away.
"It's the same old miracle that never stops happening. I shan't even be a woman, ever," faltered Leslie Long, "unless you help to make me one!"