For a moment he forgot that he was there playing checkers with himself and Elinor for Ted.
“You've never been through it, have you?” he said rather fiercely. “You can't have—you couldn't talk like that if you had. When you've put everything you've got in mind or body or soul completely in one person's hands and then, just because of a silly misunderstanding we neither of us meant—they drop it—and you drop with it and the next thing you know you're nothing but a mess and all you can wonder is if even the littlest part of you will ever feel whole again—” He realized that he was very nearly shouting, and then, suddenly, that if he kept on this way the game was over and lost. He must think about Ted, not Nancy. Ted, Ted. Mr. Theodore Billett, Jr.
“She'd forgiven me such a lot,” he ended rather lamely. “I thought she'd keep on.”
But his outburst had only made Elinor feel the sorrier for him—he felt like a burglar as he saw the kindness in her eyes.
“I don't imagine she ever had such an awful lot to forgive, Ollie,” she said gently.
Then the lie he had been leading up to all the way came at last, magnificently hesitant.
“She had, Elinor. I was in France you know.”
He was afraid when he had said it—it sounded so much like a title out of a movie—but he looked steadily at her and saw all the color go out of her face and then return to it burningly.
“Well, that wasn't anything to be—forgiven about exactly—was it?” she said unsteadily.
He spoke carefully, in broken sentences, only the knowledge that this was the only way he could think of to help things nerving his mind. “It wasn't being in France, Elinor. It was—the adjuncts. I don't suppose I was any worse than most of my outfit—but that didn't make it any easier when I had to tell her I hadn't been any better. I felt,” his voice rose, his literary trick of mind had come to his rescue now and made him know just how he would have felt if it had really happened, “I felt as if I were in hell. Really. But I had to tell her. And when she'd forgiven me that—and said that it was all right—that it didn't make any real difference now—I thought she was about the finest person in the world—for telling me such nice lies. And after that—I was so sure that it was all right—that because of her knowing and still being able to care—it would last—oh well—”