army's fault giving two of her husbands leave at the same
time.'

Selwyn frowned, 'What a dreadful experience!' he said.

'Oh, I don't know.' She gave a little shrug of her shoulders, but the
spirit of badinage had vanished both from her face and from her voice.
'It didn't take long to lose most of one's illusions. It is one thing to
meet people as Lord Durwent's daughter, and quite another as a free-lance
ambulance-driver. I've seen what people really are since I've been on my
own, and I'm sick of the whole thing.'

'You don't mean that, Elise?'

'I do. Men are rotten, and women are cats.'

He smiled quizzically, but she kept her eyes averted from his. It almost
appeared as if she were determined to retain her pose of callousness at
any effort, but his sense of psychology told him that his first
conjecture was correct. The girl who had endured was trying to hide
herself behind the personality of her old self.

'My dear girl,' he said slowly, 'it is an old trick of women to talk for
the purpose of convincing themselves. I don't care what you have
seen--you could not have passed through the ordeal of these long months
and believe in your innermost soul that either men or women are rotten.
In many ways I feel as if what little knowledge I possess dates from last
night; and I have learned things about men right here in this ward to-day
that have made me humble. These chaps that we call ignorant, the lower
classes--why, they are superb, wonderful. I tell you they have greatness
in them. I wish you could have seen them'----

'Haven't I seen them,' she cried, with a little catch in her throat,
'hundreds and hundreds of times? Almost every day, and at all hours of
the night, I've gone to meet the Red Cross trains. I have seen men die
while being lifted out of the ambulance--men who would try to smile their
thanks to us just before the end came. I have'---- She caught her hands
in a tight grip, and her eyes welled with tears. 'But they're just
jingoes, I suppose,' she said, blending a scornfulness with her repressed
grief.

'I have deserved this,' said Selwyn, his face drawn. 'Nothing that you
can say is half so bitter as my thoughts.'

'I didn't mean to hurt you,' she said.

'If ever a man was sincere, I was, Elise. Since I left you at Roselawn I
have followed the one path, thinking there was a great light ahead. Now
I am afraid that, perhaps, it was only a mirage.'

'No, it wasn't,' she replie