r. McKenzie won't
let me tell Dad--he's too ill--but we told you because you are my good
friend, Drusilla."

She might have been more than that, but he did not know it. When he
went away with Jean, she looked after him wistfully.

"Good-bye, little Galahad," she said.

The Captain stared. "Oh, I say, do you call him that?"

She nodded.

"He's a knight in shining armor--"

"I can't understand why he's not fightin'."

"Nobody understands. There's something back of it, and meantime people
are calling him a coward--"

"Doesn't look like a slacker."

"He isn't. I have sometimes thought," said wise Drusilla, "that it
might be his father. He's a gay old bird, and Derry has to jack him
up."

"Drink?"

"Yes. They say that Derry has followed him night after night--getting
him home if he could; if not, staying with him."

"Hard lines--"

"And yet he is asking little Jean to marry him. I wonder if she will
keep step with him."

"Why shouldn't she?"

"Because Derry is going to travel far and fast in the next few months,"
Drusilla prophesied.

Her face settled into tired lines. For the first time the Captain saw
her divorced from her radiance. He set himself to cheer her.

"What is troubling you, dear woman?"

She was very frank, and she told him the truth. "I should have been
glad to keep step with him myself."

He laid his hand over hers. "If you had, where would I be? From the
moment I saw you, you filled my heart."

So, after all, she had been to him from the first, not a type but a
woman. It had come to him like that, but not to her. "You're the
bravest and best man I have ever met," she told him, "but I don't love
you."

"I should be glad to wait," said the poor Captain, "until you could
find something in me to like."

"I find a great deal to like," she said, "but it wouldn't be fair to
give you anything less than love."

"At least you'll let me have your friendship--to take back with me."

She looked at him, startled. "Oh, you are going back?"

"I may get my orders any day. There are things I can be doing over
there."

Some day she was to see him "over there," to see him against a
background of fire and flame and smoke, to see him transfigured by
heroism, and she was to remember then with an aching heart this moment
when he had told her that he loved her.

It was dark when Derry brought Jean home. There had been a sunset and
an afterglow, and a twilight, and an evening st