The girl shook her head. “You can’t mean, Dick, that you have come over to enlist in this war because of what I said in New York? Oh, dear me, I thought I was unhappy enough. Now if anything happens to you your mother will have every right not to forgive me; besides, I shall never forgive myself.”
Barbara said the last few words under her breath. Although hearing them perfectly, Dick Thornton only smiled.
“Oh, I wouldn’t take matters as seriously as that,” he returned. “I didn’t mean to make you responsible for my proceedings. I only meant you waked me up and then, please heaven, I did the rest myself. See here, Barbara, after all I am a man, or at least made in the image of one. And I want to tell you frankly that I’ve gone into this terrible war game for two reasons. I don’t suppose many people do things in this world from unmixed motives. I want to help the Allies; I think they are right and so they have got to win. Then I thought I’d like to prove that I had some of the real stuff in me and wasn’t just the little son of a big man. Then, well, here are you and Mill. I’m not a whole lot of use, but I like being around if anything should go wrong. We didn’t know each other very long, Barbara, but I’m frank to confess I like you. You seem to me the bravest, most go-ahead girl I ever met, and I am proud to know you. I believe we were meant to be friends. Just see how we have been calling each other by our first names as if we had been doing it always. Funny how we left our titles behind us in New York.”
Dick was talking on at random, trying to persuade his companion to a little more cheerfulness. Surely they were meeting again in gruesome surroundings. Yet one must not meet even life’s worst tragedies without the courage of occasional laughter.
“But I’m not brave, or any of the things you are kind enough to think me; I’m not even deserving of your friendship, let alone your praise,” the girl answered meekly. Her old sparkle and fire appeared gone. Dick Thornton was first amazed and then angry. What had they been doing to his little friend to make her so changed in a few weeks? He said nothing, however, only waited for her to go on.
But Barbara did not continue at once. For of a sudden there was an unexpected noise, a savage roaring and bellowing and then a muffled explosion.
The hand inside the American boy’s turned suddenly cold.
“What was that?” she whispered.
But Dick shook his head indifferently. “Oh, just a few big guns letting themselves go. They do that now and then unexpectedly. There is no real fighting. I have been here a week. Sometimes at night there is a steady crack, crack of rifles down miles and miles of the trenches from both sides and as far off as you can hear. Then every once in a while like thunder of angry heathen gods the cannons roar. It’s a pretty mad, bad world, Barbara.”
By this time the noise had died away and Barbara took her hand from Dick’s.