Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried feebly to move his right arm.
But it was gone.
At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But when he looked it was not there.
There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.
The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened with his eyes on her face—eyes like those of a sick child.
In that manner they got by the first few days.
"It won't make any difference to her," he said once. "She'd take me back if I was only a fragment." Then bitterly: "That's all I am—a fragment! A part of a man!"
After a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it. His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told her.
"An actress!" she cried, sitting bolt upright. "Du lieber—an actress!"
"Not an actress," he corrected her gravely. "A—a dancer. But good. She's a very good girl. Even when I was—was whole"—raging bitterness there—"I was not good enough for her."