"He does sound nice," she said. "Oh, I wish everybody had enough money!"
Frank drew another distinction.
"Everybody who deserved it, anyhow."
"Well," said Ellen softly, "if I had the arrangement of things, I would risk it and give everybody enough. It makes me so unhappy to see people longing for things they can never possibly get—whether they deserve them or not."
The young soldier looked at her oddly from the corner of his eye. Could it be possible that two people could sit so close together and speak in such hushed confidence, and yet that one of them could be so strangely oblivious as not to know when she had laid her slender little finger on the other's open wound? He had the strictest notions of duty and of honor: it was absolutely essential she never should realize: but, alas! the sympathetic widow was playing the most divinely romantic waltz. To complete the horrible temptation, Ellen looked suddenly at him with her tender eyes shining and her delicate skin gently flushed and murmured—
"It makes me wretched—I pity them so!"
The waltz grew more romantic with every note, the temptation to feel this pity soothe his own wound more irresistible.
"I'm one of 'em," he said.
He endeavored to compromise with duty by throwing the most unfeeling ferocity into his confession; but even the best drilled soldier cannot simultaneously advance and stand where he was.
Ellen's eyes were riveted on him now.