It was an odd fact, which she had noted long before today, that anything connected with home, a letter from her father or her aunt, news of the doings of any of her Chicago friends (the birth of Olive Corbett’s second baby, for example), any vivid projection of a bit of the pattern of the life into which she had once been woven, roused that nightmare memory.  Or gave, rather, to a memory which normally did not trouble her much, the quality of a nightmare; a moment of paralyzed incredulity that it could have happened to her; a pang of clear horror that it really and truly had happened to her very self; to this Mary Wollaston who still lived in the very place where it had happened.

This afternoon, while she had sat awaiting from moment to moment the appearance of her brother, or at least the sound of his voice over the telephone, the pang had been prolonged into an agony.  She had let herself drift into a fantastic speculation of a sort that was perfectly new.  What if the boy who had shared that crazy adventure with her, himself an officer bound overseas, had fallen in with Rush, made friends with him, told him the story!

This was pure melodrama, she knew.  There was, in any external sense, nothing to be feared.  The thing had happened almost a year ago.  It had had no consequences—­except this inexplicable one that her brother’s approach brought back the buried memory of it.  Why should it cling like that?  Like an acid that wouldn’t wash off!  She was not, as far as her mind went, ashamed of it.  Never had been.  But, waiving all the extenuating circumstances—­which had really surrounded the act—­admitting that it was a sin (this thing that she had done once and had, later, learned the impossibility of ever doing again), was it any worse than what her brother had probably done a score of times?

What was this brother of hers going to be like?  It wasn’t possible, of course, that she would find him the boy he had been five years ago, before he went to France—­though from some of his letters one might have thought he hadn’t changed a bit.  Wasn’t it likely that he’d turn out to be some one she could cling to a little; confide her perplexities to—­some of them?  Was there a chance that ripened, disillusioned, made gentle and wise by the alchemy of the furnace he had come through, he might prove to be the one person in the world to whom she could confide everything?  That would make an end to her nightmare, she felt sure.

The question whether he was or was not going to turn out like that was one presently to be answered.  Until she knew the answer she didn’t want to think at all, least of all about those things which Baldy’s talk to-night kept rousing echoes of.