I'm weak. I can't stand pain. I lie awake in the dead hours of night
and I cry like a baby, like a fool. I weep for myself, for my mother,
for Lorna, for _you_...."

"Hush!" She put a soft hand over his lips.

"Very well, I'll not be bitter," he went on, with mounting pulse,
with thrill and rush of inexplicable feeling, as if at last had come
the person who would not be deaf to his voice. "Mel, I'm still the
boy, your schoolmate, who used to pull the bow off your braid.... I am
that boy still in heart, with all the war upon my head, with the years
between then and now. I'm young and old.... I've lived the whole
gamut--the fresh call of war to youth, glorious, but God! as false as
stairs of sand--the change of blood, hard, long, brutal, debasing
labor of hands, of body, of mind to learn to kill--to survive and
kill--and go on to kill.... I've seen the marching of thousands of
soldiers--the long strange tramp, tramp, tramp, the beat, beat, beat,
the roll of drums, the call of bugles, the boom of cannon in the dark,
the lightnings of hell flaring across the midnight skies, the thunder
and chaos and torture and death and pestilence and decay--the hell of
war. It is not sublime. There is no glory. The sublimity is in man's
acceptance of war, not for hate or gain, but love. Love of country,
home, family--love of women--I fought for women--for Helen, whom I
imagined my ideal, breaking her heart over me on the battlefield. Not
that Helen failed _me_, but failed the ideal for which I fought!... My
little sister Lorna! I fought for her, and I fought for a dream that
existed only in my heart. Lorna--Alas!... I fought for other women,
all women--and _you_, Mel Iden. And in you, in your sacrifice and your
strength to endure, I find something healing to my sore heart. I find
my ideal embodied in you. I find hope and faith for the future
embodied in you. I find--"

"Oh Daren, you shame me utterly," she protested, freeing her hands in
gesture of entreaty. "I am outcast."

"To a false and rotten society, yes--you are," he returned. "But Mel,
that society is a mass of maggots. It is such women as you, such men
as Blair, who carry the spirit onward.... So much for that. I have
spoken to try to show you where I hold you. I do not call your--your
trouble a blunder, or downfall, or dishonor. I call it a misfortune
because--because--"

"Because there was not love," she supplemented, as he halted at fault.
"Yes, that is where I wronged