“Why, Wayne, you can scarcely expect me to be—­wholly pleased, can you?”

“But you always seemed to understand so well.  I”—­he paused in that constraint there so often was between them in things delicately intimate—­“I’ve never told you, Katie, how fine I thought you were.  So big about it.”

“It’s not so difficult,” said Kate, with a touch of her old smile, “to be ‘big’ about people who aren’t marrying into the family.”

It seemed that he, too, was not above cornering her.  “You know, Katie, it was your attitude in the beginning that—­”

“Just don’t bother calling my attention to that, Wayne,” she said sharply.  “Please credit me with the intelligence to see it for myself.”

Then she went right to the heart of it.  “Oh Wayne—­think of Major Barrett’s knowing.”

The dull red that came quickly to his face told how bitterly he had thought of it, though he only said quietly:  “Damn Barrett.”

“But you can’t damn him.  Suppose you were to be stationed at the same place!”

He laughed shortly.  “Well that, at least, is something upon which I can set your fears at rest.”

She looked up quickly.  “What do you mean?”

“I mean, Katie, that my army days are over.”

She stared at him.  “I don’t understand you.”

“It shouldn’t be so difficult to comprehend.  I have resigned my commission.”

“Wayne,” she asked slowly, “what do you mean?”

“Just what I say.  That I have resigned my commission.  That I am out of the army.”

It made it seem that the whole world was whirling round and round and that there was nothing to take hold of.  “But you can’t do that.  Why your whole life is there—­friends—­traditions—­work—­future.”

“Not my future,” he said briefly.

His calm manner made it the more bewildering.  “Wayne, I don’t see how you can—­in such a light manner—­give up such a big thing!”

He turned upon her in manner less calm.  “What right have you to say that it is done in a ’light manner’!”

The words had a familiar sound and she recalled them as like something she had said to Mrs. Prescott the day before; just the day before, when she had been so sure of things, and of herself.

“But where is your future then, Wayne?” she asked appealingly.  “We know, don’t we, how hard it is for army men to find futures as civilians?”

“I’m going into the forest service.”

Katie never could tell why, for the moment, it should have antagonized, infuriated her that way.  “So that’s it.  That’s what got—­a poetic notion!  And I suppose,” she laughed scornfully, “you’re going into the ranks?  What is it they call them?  Rangers?  Starting in at your age—­with your training—­to ’work from the bottom up’—­is that it?”