And then Norval told Donelle about Tom Gavot.
"You see that girl in Canada is married—was married, I mean; the young fellow is dead. He lies under French earth in a pretty little village that's been battered to the ground. Some day it will rise gloriously again. I like to think of that Canadian boy sleeping there, waiting.
"He was a surveyor and, before a dirty sniper got him, he used to prowl about the desolated country and lay out roads! In his mind, you know. He was a fanciful chap, but a practical worker.
"I ran across him one day; I had known him before. He had never liked me when I knew him in Canada, but most anything goes when you're over there. He got to—to rather chumming with me at last, and many a laugh I've had with him over the roads he saw through the hell about us.
"Once we had silently agreed to ignore the past—and the poor fellow had something to forgive in it, though not all he had supposed—we got on famously. We really got to feel like brothers. You do—there. He was a queer chap through and through. He always expected he was going to do the white-livered thing and he always did the bravest when the snap came. He did his thinking and squirming beforehand. At the critical moment he just acted up like—well, like the man he was.
"Why, he would talk by the hour of what a good idea it was of the Government's to let the families of men, shot as traitors, think them heroes who had died serving their country. He often said it didn't matter, one way or the other, for the man who got what was coming to him, but for them who had to live on it was something to think the best, even if it were not so.
"Then he'd write letters and cards, to be sent home in case he should meet a traitor's death. Poor devil! I have some of those letters now."
A throbbing, aching pause. Then:
"Miss Walden, does this depress you too much?"
"No, it—I—I love it, Mr. Norval. Please go on; it is a beautiful story."