a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he
was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it.
His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside
him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told
her.

"An actress!" she cried, sitting bolt upright. "_Du lieber_--an
actress!"

"Not an actress," he corrected her gravely. "A--a dancer. But good.
She's a very good girl. Even when I was--was whole"--raging
bitterness there--"I was not good enough for her."

"No actress is good. And dancers!"

"You don't know what you are talking about," he said roughly, and
turned his back to her. It was almost insulting to have her assist
him to his attitude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows
behind his back. Lying there he tried hard to remember that this
woman belonged to his hereditary foes. He was succeeding in hating
her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.

"Poor boy! Poor little one!" she said. And her voice was husky.

When at last he was moved from the hospital to the prison camp she
pinned the sleeve of his ragged uniform across his chest and kissed
him, to his great discomfiture. Then she went to the curtained
corner that was her quarters and wept long and silently.

The prison camp was overcrowded. Early morning and late evening
prisoners were lined up to be counted. There was a medley of
languages--French, English, Arabic, Russian. The barracks were built
round a muddy inclosure in which the men took what exercise they
could.

One night a boy with a beautiful tenor voice sang Auld Lang Syne
under the boy's window. He stood with his hand on the cuff of his
empty sleeves and listened. And suddenly a great shame filled him,
that with so many gone forever, with men dying every minute of
every hour, back at the lines, he had been so obsessed with himself.
He was still bitter, but the bitterness was that he could not go
back again and fight.

When he had been in the camp a month he helped two British officers
to escape. One of them had snubbed him in London months before. He
apologised before he left.

"You're a man, Hamilton," he said. "All you Canadians are men. I've
some things to tell when I get home."

The boy could not go with them. There would be canals to swim
across, and there was his empty sleeve and weakness. He would never
swim again, he thought. That night, as he looked at the empty beds
of the men who had gone, he remembere