He laughed harshly.  “Oh I was just one of those fools roped in by a recruiting officer in a gallant-looking white suit!”

“You were—?” she faltered.

“In the ranks.  One of the men.”  The fact that she should be looking like that drove him to add bitterly:  “Like Watts, you know.”

She stood there in silence, held.  The radiance had all fallen from her.  She was looking at him with something of the woe and reproach of a child for a cherished thing hurt.

“Why, Katie,” he cried, “does it matter so?  I thought it was only when we were in that we were so—­impossible.”

But she did not take the hands he stretched out.  She was held.

It drove him desperate.  “Well if that’s so—­if to have been in the army at all is a thing to make you look like that—­Heaven knows,” he threw in, “I don’t blame you for despising us for fools!—­But I don’t know what you’ll say when I tell you—­”

“When you tell me—­what?” she whispered.

“That I have no honorable discharge to lay at your feet.  That I left your precious army through the noble gates of a military prison!”

She took a step backward, swaying.  The anguish which mingled with the horror in her face made him cry:  “Katie, let me tell you!  Let me show you—­”

But Katie, white-faced, was standing erect, braced for facing it.  “What for?  What did you do?”

Her voice was quick, sharp; tenseness made her seem arrogant.  It roused something ugly in him.  “I knocked down a cur of a lieutenant,” he said, and laughed defiantly.

“You struck—­an officer?”

“I knocked down a man who ought to have been knocked down!”

“Struck—­your superior officer?”

“Katie,” he cried, “that’s your way of looking at it!  But let me tell you—­let me show you—­”

But she had turned from him, covered her face; and before Katie there swept again those pictures, sounds:  her father’s voice ringing out over parade ground—­silent, motionless regiment; the notes of retreat—­those bugle notes, piercing, compelling, thing before which all other things must fall away—­evening gun and lowered flag—­

She lifted colorless face, shaking her head.

“Katie!” he cried.  “Our life—­our love—­our life—­”

She raised her hand for silence, still shaking her head.

“Won’t you—­fight for it?” he whispered. “Try?”

She kept shaking her head.  “Anything else,” she managed to articulate. 
“Anything else.  Not this.  You don’t understand.  Can’t.  Never would.” 
Suddenly she cried:  “Oh—­go away!”

For a moment he stood there.  But her face was locked against appeal. 
Colorless, unsteady, he turned and left her.

Katie put out her hand.  Her father—­her father in uniform, it had been so real, it seemed he must be there.  But he was not there.  Nothing was there.  Nothing at all.  As the front door closed she started forward, but there sounded for her again the notes of the bugle—­piercing, compelling, thing before which all other things must fall away.  “Taps,” this time, as blown over her father’s grave, soldiers’ heads bowed and tears falling for a fine soldier who would respond to bugle calls no more.