to keep that in the background. I want to forget
everything but that you are here and that I'm happy," she whispered,
with her arms about his neck. "I want to forget everything else--until
it's time for you to go."

"Amen," Thompson replied, and kissed her, and then they went silently,
hand in hand down to the swinging bridge with the sun gone to rest below
the western sky-line, and dusk creeping softly up over the valley
floor.

* * * * *

There will be those who, having followed so far, will desire further
light. They will ask naively: Did Wes Thompson go back to the front and
get killed? Did they marry and find lasting happiness?

To these curious folk who seek explicit detail, I can only point out
that Wes Thompson had three months' leave which ran into November, and
that to Sophie that ninety days loomed like a stay of execution. I would
ask them further to recall the eleventh of November, 1918--and so the
first question is duly answered.

As for the second--I am no soothsayer. I cannot foretell the future.
Most certainly they married. At once--with a haste prudery and lovers of
formalism might term indecent.

Whether they live happily who can say? Somewhere between the day he
first looked on Sophie Carr at Lone Moose and the day he fell five
thousand feet to earth in a flaming battle-plane, keeping his life by
one of war's miracles, Wes Thompson lived and loved and suffered perhaps
a little more than falls to the common lot. He sloughed off prejudices
and cant and ignorance and narrowness in those six years as a tree sheds
its foliage in autumn.

A man may come to doubt the omnipotence of God without denying his
Maker. He may scorn churchly creeds and cleave to the Golden Rule. He
may hate greed and oppression, and injustice and intolerance, and
ruthless exploitation of man by man--and still hold firm faith in
humanity, still yearn to love his neighbor as himself.

To do good, to fight hard and play fair, to love faithfully and to
desire love, to go out of the world when his time should come with the
knowledge of having at least tried to make it a little better for those
who were in it, and for those who should come after. That was Wes
Thompson's working philosophy of life--if he might be said to have a
philosophy--although he certainly never formulated it in words.

He married a woman whom he loved dearly, who loved him, was proud of
him, who saw life as he did--through