“I dunno. Oh, how I wish I was in my old bunk at Coblenz. I warn't made for buckin' against the world this way.... If we had old Dan with us.... Funny that you know Dan.... He'd have a million ideas for gettin' out of this fix. But I'm glad he's not here. He'd bawl me out so, for not havin' made good. He's a powerful ambitious kid, is Dan.”
“But it's not the sort of thing a man can make good in, Al,” said Andrews slowly. They were silent. There was no sound in the courtyard, only very far away the clatter of a patrol of cavalry over cobblestones. The sky had become overcast and the room was very dark. The mouldy plaster peeling off the walls had streaks of green in it. The light from the courtyard had a greenish tinge that made their faces look pale and dead, like the faces of men that have long been shut up between damp prison walls.
“And Fuselli had a girl named Mabe,” said Andrews.
“Oh, she married a guy in the Naval Reserve. They had a grand wedding,” said Al.
IV
“At last I've got to you!”
John Andrews had caught sight of Genevieve on a bench at the end of the garden under an arbor of vines. Her hair flamed bright in a splotch of sun as she got to her feet. She held out both hands to him.
“How good-looking you are like that,” she cried.
He was conscious only of her hands in his hands and of her pale-brown eyes and of the bright sun-splotches and the green shadows fluttering all about them.
“So you are out of prison,” she said, “and demobilized. How wonderful! Why didn't you write? I have been very uneasy about you. How did you find me here?”