e, Dave; not that I want to know, for
knowing's sake, but just that I--perhaps I--can help."

Dave was silent for a moment, watching her. She had changed her
position, and he could see her face. Suddenly it occurred to him that
Edith Duncan was beautiful. If she had not quite the fine features of
Irene, she had a certain softness of expression, a certain mellowness,
even tenderness, of lip and eye; a certain womanly delicacy----

"Edith," he said, "you're white. Why is it that the woman a man loves
will fail him, and the woman he only likes--stays true?"

"Oh!" she cried, and he could not guess the depths from which her cry
was wrung. . . . "I should not have asked you, Dave," she said. "I'm
sorry."

They stood a moment, neither wishing to move away. "You said you had
something must be done at once," she reminded him at length.

"Yes," he answered. "I have to kill a man. Then I'm going to join up
with the army."

Her hands were again upon him. "But you mustn't, Dave," she pleaded.
"No matter--no matter _what_--you mustn't do that. That is the one
thing you must not do."

"Edith, you are not a man. You don't understand. That is the one
thing I must do."

"But you can't fight for your country, then. You will only increase
its troubles in these troubled times. Don't think I'm pleading for
_him_, Dave, but for you, for the sake of us--for the sake of
those--who care."

He took her hands in his and raised them to his shoulders and drew her
face close to his. Then, speaking very slowly, and with each word by
itself, "Do you really care?" he said.

"Oh, Dave!"

"Then come to my room and talk to me. Talk to me! Talk to me! For
God's sake talk to me. I must talk to some one."

She followed him. Inside the room he had himself under control again.
The street lights flooded through the windows, so he did not press the
switch. He motioned her to a chair.

And then he told her the story, all he knew.

When he had finished she arose and walked to one of the windows and
stood looking with unseeing eyes upon the street. For the second time
in his life Dave Elden had laid his heart bare to her, and again after
all these years he still talked as friend to friend. That was it. She
was under no delusion. Dave's eyes were as blind to her love as they
had been that night when he had first told her of Irene Hardy. And she
could not tell him. Most of all, she could not tell him now. . . .
Yes, she