That night he was going back.  Katie, too, had gone.  For the first time that summer neither of them would be there.  It seemed giving up.

Loneliness reached out into places vast and barren in the thought that both in the things of the heart and the affairs of men he seemed destined to remain apart.

He looked far more the dreamer than the man of warfare as he sat there, his face, which was so finely sensitive as sometimes to be called cold, saddened with the light of dreams which know themselves for dreams alone.

That very first night, night when she had been so shy, he had felt in her that which he called the real thing, which he knew for the great thing, which had been, for him, the thing unattainable.  And with all her timidity, aloofness, elusiveness, he had felt an inexplicable nearness to her.

He had found out something about the conditions girls had to meet.  His face hardened, then tightened with pain in the thought of those being the conditions Ann was meeting.  He did not believe those conditions would go on many days longer if every man had to see them in relation to some one he cared for.  “The poor ye have always with you” might then prove less authoritative—­less satisfying—­as the final word.

And the other conditions—­things his sort stood for—­Darrett—­the whole story—­He had come to loathe the words chivalry and honor and all the rest of the empty terms that resounded so glibly against false standards.

Something was wrong with the world and he could not see that improving a rifle was going to go very far toward setting it right.

And there was springing up within him, even in his loneliness and gloom, a passion to be doing something that would help set it right.

An older officer with whom he had been talking that day had spoken lovingly of his father, under whom he had served; spoken of his hardihood and integrity, his manliness and soldierliness.  As he thought of it now it seemed to him that just because he was his father’s son—­had in him the blood of the soldier—­he should help fight the real battles of the day—­the long stern battles of peace.

His father had served, faithfully and well.  He, too, would like to serve.  But yesterday’s needs were not to-day’s needs, nor were the methods of yesterday desirable, even possible, for to-day.  What could be farther from serving one’s own day than rendering to it the dead forms of what had been the real service to a day gone by?

There came a curious thought that to give up the things of war might be the only way to save the things that war had left him.  That perhaps he could only transmit his heritage by recasting the form of giving.

Looking out across the miles of the city’s roofs, hearing the rumble of the city as it came faintly up to him, watching the people hurrying to and fro, there was something puerile in the argument that men any longer needed war to fill their lives, must have the war fear to keep them from softness and degeneration.  Thinking of the problems of that very city, it seemed men need not worry greatly about having nothing to fight for, no stimulus to manhood.