nd. That was shortly after I was married, and I was helping
entertain these stray dogs from the front. It was quite the fashion.
People took them out motoring and so on. I remembered Mills out of all
the others because he was different from the average Tommy, quiet
without being self-conscious. I remembered thinking often what a pity
nice boys like that must be killed and crippled by the thousand. When
we came here, Charlie was working down at the settlement. Somehow I
was awfully glad to see him--any friendly face would have been welcome
those first months before I grew used to these terrible silences, this
complete isolation which I had never before known.

"Well, the upshot was that he fell in love with me, and for
awhile--for a little while--I thought I was experiencing a real
affection at last, myself; a new love rising fine and true out of the
ashes of old ones.

"And it frightened me. It made me stop and think. When he would stare
at me with those sad eyes I wanted to comfort him, I wanted to go away
with him to some distant place where no one knew me and begin life all
over again. And I knew it wouldn't do. It would only be the same thing
over again, because I'm made the way I am. I was beginning to see that
it would take a good deal of a man to hold my fitful fancy very long.
Charlie's a nice boy. He's clean and sensitive, and I'm sure he'd be
kind and good to any woman. Still, I knew it wouldn't do. Curious
thing--all the while that my mind was telling me how my whole
existence had unfitted me to be a wife to such a man--for Charlie
Mills is as full of romantic illusions as a seventeen-year-old
girl--at the same time some queer streak in me made me long to wipe
the slate clean and start all over again. But I could never convince
myself that it was anything more than sex in me responding to the
passion that so deeply moved him. That suspicion became certainty at
last. That is why I say Charlie Mills taught me something about
myself."

"I think it was a dear lesson for him," Hollister said, remembering
the man's moods and melancholy, the bitterness of frustration which
must have torn Mills. "You hurt him."

"I know it, and I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it," she said
patiently. "There was a time just about a year ago when I very nearly
went away with him. I think he felt that I was yielding. But I was
trying to be honest with myself and with him. With all my vagaries, my
uncertain emotions, I didn't want ju