"You are going to France?" he asked.
"I am leaving for camp next week. That means France, I hope."
"Until the end of the war?"
"Until the end—or as long as I hold out. I shall not give up."
For the first time she had turned to look at him, and as she raised her lashes a veil of dry, scorching pain gathered before her eyes. He looked older, he looked changed, and, as Mrs. Timberlake had said, he looked as if he had suffered. The energy, the force which had always seemed to her dynamic, was still there in his keen brown face, in his muscular figure; only when he smiled did she notice that the youth in his eyes had passed into bitterness—not the bitterness of ineffectual rebellion, but the bitterness that accepts life on its own terms, and conquers.
"When I parted from you last autumn," he said suddenly, "I was full of hope. I could look ahead with confidence, and with happiness. I felt, in a way, that the worst was over for both of us—that the future would be better and richer. I never looked forward to life with more trust than I did then," he added, as if the memory of the past were forcing the words out of him.
"And I, also," she answered, with her sincere and earnest gaze on his face, "I believed, and I hoped."
He looked away from her over the red and white roses. "It is different now. I can see nothing for myself—nothing for my own life. Where hope was there is only emptiness."
The sunset was reflected in the shining light of her eyes. "Life can never be empty for me while I have your friendship and can think of you."
By the glow in his face she knew that her words had moved him; yet he spoke, after a moment, as if he had not heard them. "It is only fair that you should know the truth," he said slowly and gravely, "that you should know that I have cared for you, and cared, I think, in the way you would wish me to. Nothing in my life has been more genuine than this feeling. I have tested it in the last year, and I know that it is as real as myself. You have been not only an emotion in my heart—you have been a thought in my mind—every minute—through everything——" He stopped, and still without turning his eyes on her, went on more rapidly, "As a lover I might always have been a failure. There have been so many other things. Life has had a way of crowding out emotion to make room for other problems and responsibilities. I am telling you this now because we are parting—perhaps for a time, perhaps for ever. The end no one can see——"