Once or twice before Dick had been surprised at Barbara Meade’s unexpected tears, but now he understood them at once.
He offered her the comfort she had wished a little while before. Gently he took her hand inside his left one.
“I know you are thinking of me, Barbara, and this tiresome old arm of mine. It is tremendously kind of you,” he protested. “But I want you to promise me not to worry and to keep Mill from fretting if you can. I hate you girls to go off to work again without me, but I’ve made up my mind to stay around Paris for a few months. I’m rather glad to have this chance to explain things to you. Of course, you know that when that shell shattered my shoulder it seemed to paralyze my arm. Well, I have not given up hope that something may yet be done for it. So as soon as I can get hold of one of the big surgeons here in Paris I want him to have a try at me. They are fairly busy these days with people who are of more account, but if I hang around long enough some one will find time to look after me. You know I have never told, nor let Mildred tell mother and father just how serious things are with me. But if nothing can be done I’ve made up my mind to go home and find out what a one-armed man can do to be useful. He isn’t much good over here at present. You see, Barbara, I have not yet forgotten your New York lectures on the duty and beauty of usefulness.”
Dick said this in a laughing voice, with no intention of attempting the heroic, so Barbara did her best to answer in the same spirit.
Nevertheless, she had never gotten over her sense of responsibility and might always continue to feel it.
“Oh, I am sure something can be done,” she answered, forcing herself to speak bravely. “But in any case you will come and say good-by to Mill and the rest of us before you sail, won’t you?” she concluded.
Dick nodded, but by this time they had both gotten up and were walking across the roof top side by side.
“I say, Barbara,” Dick added shyly just at the moment of parting, “however things turn out, promise me you won’t take it too seriously. Somehow I can’t say things as well as other fellows, but I’m not sorry I came over, in spite of this plagued arm of mine. I don’t know why exactly, but this war business makes a man of one. Then when one thinks of what other fellows are having to give up—oh well, I read a poem by an Englishman who was killed the other day. Would you mind my reciting the last lines to you?”
Then taking the girl’s consent for granted, Dick went on in a grave young voice that had much of the beauty which Barbara remembered in his song the year before.
“His name was Rupert Brooke and he wrote of the men who were going to die as he did: