“No.  To be honest, the shock of that enlightened me.”

“Daren Lane, I’m just what you men have made me,” she burst out, passionately.

“You are mistaken.  I beg to be excluded from any complicity in the—­in whatever you’ve been made,” he said, bitterly.  “I have been true to you in deed and in thought all this time.”

“You must be a queer soldier!” she exclaimed, incredulously.

“I figure there were a couple of million soldiers like me, queer or not,” he retorted.

She gazed at him with something akin to hate in her eyes.  Then putting her hands to her full hips she began that swaying, dancing walk to and fro before the window.  She was deeply hurt.  Lane had meant to get under her skin with a few just words of scorn, and he had imagined his insinuation as to the change in her had hurt her feelings.  Suddenly he divined it was not that at all—­he had only wounded her vanity.

“Helen, let’s not talk of the past,” he said.  “It’s over.  Even if you had been true to me, and I loved you still—­I would have been compelled to break our engagement.”

“You would!  And why?”

“I am a physical wreck—­and a mental one, too, I fear....  Helen, I’ve come home to die.”

“Daren!” she cried, poignantly.

Then he told her in brief, brutal words of the wounds and ravages war had dealt him, and what Doctor Bronson’s verdict had been.  Lane felt shame in being so little as to want to shock and hurt her, if that were possible.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she burst out.  “Your mother—­your sister....  Oh, that damned horrible war! What has it not done to us?...  Daren, you looked white and weak, but I never thought you were—­going to die....  How dreadful!”

Something of her girlishness returned to her in this moment of sincerity.  The past was not wholly dead.  Memories lingered.  She looked at Lane, wide-eyed, in distress, caught between strange long-forgotten emotions.

“Helen, it’s not dreadful to have to die,” replied Lane. “That is not the dreadful part in coming home.”

“What is dreadful, then?” she asked, very low.

Lane felt a great heave of his breast—­the irrepressible reaction of a profound and terrible emotion, always held in abeyance until now.  And a fierce pang, that was physical as well as emotional, tore through him.  His throat constricted and ached to a familiar sensation—­the welling up of blood from his lungs.  The handkerchief he put to his lips came away stained red.  Helen saw it, and with dilated eyes, moved instinctively as if to touch him, hold him in her pity.

“Never mind, Helen,” he said, huskily.  “That’s nothing....  Well, I was about to tell you what is so dreadful—­for me....  It’s to reach home grateful to God I was spared to get home—­resigned to the ruin of my life—­content to die for whom I fought—­my mother, my sister, you, and all our women (for I fought for nothing else)—­and find my mother aged and bewildered and sad, my sister a painted little hussy—­and you—­a strange creature I despise....  And all, everybody, everything changed—­changed in some horrible way which proves my sacrifice in vain....  It is not death that is dreadful, but the uselessness, the hopelessness of the ideal I cherished.”