“You won't go back there again?” he exclaimed sharply. “You're not fit for such work!”
“Certainly I shall go back—as soon as ever Dr. Selwyn will let me. It's little enough to do for the men who are giving—everything!” Suddenly, the pent-up indignation within her broke bounds. “Garth, how can you stay here when men are fighting, dying—out there?” Her voice vibrated with the sense of personal shame which his apathy inspired in her. “Oh!”—as though she feared he might wound her yet further by advancing the obvious excuse—“I know you're past military age. But other men—older men than you—have gone. I know a man of fifty who bluffed and got in! There are heaps of back doors into the Army these days.”
“And there's a back door out of it—the one through which I was kicked out!” he retorted, his mouth setting itself in the familiar bitter lines.
The scoffing defiance of his attitude baffled her.
“Don't you want to help your country?” she pleaded. It was horrible to her that he should stand aside—inexplicable except in terms of that wretched business on the Indian Frontier, in the hideous truth of which only his own acknowledgment had compelled her to believe.
He looked at her with hard, indifferent eyes.
“My country made me an outcast,” he replied. “I'll remain such.”
Somehow, even in her shamed bewilderment and anger, she sensed the hurt that lay behind the curt speech.
“Men who have been cashiered, men who are too old—they're all going back,” she urged tremulously, snatching at any weapon that suggested itself.
He shrugged his shoulders.