was Sophie Carr.

He found Sophie at home about four in the afternoon, sitting in the big
living room, making Red Cross bandages. She did not stop her work when
he was ushered in. Beside her on a table stood a flat box and in this
from time to time she put a finished roll. It occurred to Thompson that
sometime one of those white bandages fabricated by her hands might be
used on him.

He smiled a bit sardonically, for the thought arose also that in the
Flying Corps the man who lost in aerial combat needed little besides a
coffin--and sometimes not even that.

Sophie looked at him almost somberly.

"I'm working, don't you see?" she said curtly.

He had never seen her in quite that unapproachable mood. He wanted her
to forget the Red Cross and the war for a little while, to look and
speak with the old lightness. He wasn't a sentimental man, but he did
want to go away with a picture of her smiling. He had not told her he
was going. He did not mean to tell her till he was leaving, and then
only to say casually: "Well, good-by. I'm off for a training-camp
to-night." He had always suspected there was something of the Spartan in
Sophie Carr's make-up. Even if he had not divined that, he had no
intention of making a fuss about his going, of trying to pose as a hero.
But he was a normal man, and he wanted his last recollection of her--if
it _should_ be his last--to be a pleasant one.

And Sophie was looking at him now, fixedly, a frosty gleam in her gray
eyes. She looked a moment, and her breast heaved. She swept the work off
her lap with a sudden, swift gesture.

"What is the matter with you--and dozens of men like you that I know?"
she demanded in a choked voice. "You stay at home living easy and
getting rich in the security that other men are buying with their blood
and their lives, over there. Fighting against odds and dying like dogs
in a ditch so that we can live here in peace and comfort. You don't even
do anything useful here. There doesn't seem to be anything that can make
you work or fight. They can sink passenger ships and bomb undefended
towns and shell hospitals, and you don't seem to resent it. I've heard
you prate about service--when you thought you walked with God and had a
mission from God to show other men the way. Why don't you serve now?
What is the matter with you? Is your skin so precious? If you can't
fight, can't you make ammunition or help to build ships? Are you a man,
or just a rabbit? I wish t