He had come close enough to self-betrayal for Katie, despite her fear and confusion, to feel proud of him as he looked then.

“Wayne,” she asked, “have you felt this way a long time?  Out of sympathy with the army?”

He did not at once reply, thinking of the night he had sat beside Ann, night when the whole world was shaken and things he had regarded as fixed loosened and fell.  Just how much had been loosening before that—­some, he knew—­just how much would have more or less insecurely held its place had it not been for that night, he was not prepared to say—­even to himself.

“Longer than I knew, I think,” he came back to Katie.  “One night last fall I went to a dinner and they drank our toast.”  He repeated it, very slowly. “’My country—­may she always be right—­but right or wrong—­my country.’

“I used to have the real thrill for that toast.  That night it almost choked me.  That ‘right or wrong’ is a spirit I can thrill to no longer.  I’m more interested in getting it right.

“Though I’ll own it terrified me, just as it seems to you, to feel it slipping from me.  Recently I had occasion to go up to West Point and I spent a whole day deliberately trying to get back my old feeling for things—­the whole business that we know so well and that I used to love so much.

“And, in a way, I could; but as for something gone.  That day up at the Point was one of the saddest of my life.  I still loved the trappings.  They still called to me.  But I knew that, for me, the spirit was dead.

“Oh I have no sensational declarations to make about the army.  I wouldn’t even be prepared to say what I think about disarmament.  It’s more complex than most peace advocates seem to see.  I only know that the army’s not the thing for me.  I can’t go on in it, simply because my feeling for it is gone.”

He had been speaking slowly and seriously; his head was bent.  Now he looked up at her.  “It was at the close of that day—­day up at West Point—­that I resigned my commission.  And if you had seen me that night, Katie, I doubt if you would reproach me with ‘doing it lightly.’”

The marks of struggle had come back to his face with the story of it.  They told more than the words.

“Forgive me,” she said in her impetuous way.  “No, I didn’t know.  How awful it is, Wayne, that we don’t know—­about each other.”

She was forced to turn away; but after a moment controlled herself and turned back to add:  “Wayne dear, I think you’re right.  I’m proud of you.”

“Oh, I’m entitled to no halo,” he hastened to say.  “It’s the fellow who would do it without an income might be candidate for that.”

“But you would do it without an income, Wayne,” she insisted warmly.

“I don’t know.  How can I tell whether I would or not?

“And you’ll be good to Ann?” he took advantage of her mood to press, as though that were the one thing she could do for him.  “You know, how much she needs you, Katie.”