Upstairs old Nannie was officiating. She was struggling with Leonard's kit, which resembled, she thought, more the rummage box of a gypsy pedler than the luggage of a gentleman.
The young officer had taken off his great-coat and was standing with his back to the hearth. He loomed up very big in the demure room, a slender, boyish figure, still too slim for his shoulder-width and height, clad in a ragged uniform, a pistol bulging from one hip at his belt. He looked about him at the bright hangings, with a wandering gaze that reverted to a spot of sunlight on Marjorie's hair and rested there.
"I'm all spinning round," he said with a puzzled smile, "like a dream."
He continued to stare with dazed, smiling eyes on the sunbeam. His hair was cropped close like a convict's, which accentuated the leanness of his face and the taut, rigid lines about his mouth. Under his discolored uniform, the body was spare almost to the point of emaciation. Through a rent in his coat, a ragged shirt revealed the bare skin. He looked at it ruefully, still smiling. "I'm rather a mess, I expect," he said. "Tried to fix up in the train, but I was too far gone in dirt to succeed much."
Marjorie, with the instinct of a kitten that comforts its master, went up to him and rubbed her head against the torn arm.
"Don't," he said, hoarsely; "I'm too dirty." He put out a hand, and softly touched her dress. "Is it pink?" he asked, "or does it only look so in this light? It feels awfully downy and nice."
She noticed that two of his nails were crushed and discolored, and the half of one was torn away. She bent down and kissed it, to hide the tears which were choking her. She felt his eyes on her, and she knew that look which made her whole being ache with tenderness—that numb, dazed look. She had seen it before in the eyes of very young soldiers home on their first leave—mute young eyes that contained the unutterable secrets of the battlefield, but revealed none. She had seen them since she came to England, sitting with their elders, gray-haired fathers who talked war, war, war, while the young tongues—once so easily braggart—remained speechless.
What had they seen, these silent youngsters—sensitive, joyous children, whom the present day had nurtured so cleanly and so tenderly? Their bringing-up had been the complex result of so much enlightened effort. War, pestilence, famine, slaughter, were only names in a history book to them. They thought hardship was sport. A blithe summer month had plunged them into the most terrible war of the scarred old earth. The battlefields where they had mustered, stunned, but tingling with vigor and eagerness, were becoming the vast cemeteries of their generation. The field where lay the young dead was their place in the sun. The still hospital where lay the maimed was their part in a civilization whose sincerity they had trusted as little children trust in the perfection of their parents.
Beside the army of maimed and fallen boys was another shadowy army of girls in their teens and sweet early twenties—the unclaimed contemporaries of a buried generation.
There was a fumbling at the door-handle and a small, muffled voice came from the corridor:—