He looked at this awhile, with a speculative, pitying air, and continued his climb, passing at last through great doors into a waiting-room, a place of high, vaulted ceilings, marble pillars, beautiful tiled floors.  He evaded welcoming matrons on the watch for unattached officers, to hale them into an anteroom reserved for such, to feed them sandwiches and doubtful coffee, and to elicit tales of their part in the grim business overseas.  This man avoided the cordial clutches of the socially elect by the simple expedient of saying that his people expected him.  He uttered this polite fiction in self-defense.  He did not want to talk or be fed.  He was sick of noise, weary of voices, irritated by raucous sounds.  All he desired was a quiet place away from the confusion of which he had been a part for many days, to get speedily beyond range of the medley of voices and people that reminded him of nothing so much as a great flock of seagulls swooping and crying over a school of herring.

He passed on to the outer door which gave on the street where taxi drivers and hotel runners bawled their wares, and here in the entrance met the first face he knew.  A man about his own age, somewhat shorter, a great deal thicker through the waist, impeccably dressed, shouldered his way through a group at the exit.

Their eyes met.  Into the faces of both leaped instant recognition.  The soldier pressed forward eagerly.  The other stood his ground.  There was a look which approached unbelief on his round, rather florid features.  But he grasped the extended hand readily enough.

“By jove, it is you, Wes,” he said.  “I couldn’t believe my eyes.  So you’re back alive, eh?  You were reported killed, you know.  Shot down behind the German lines.  You made quite a record, didn’t you?  How’s everything over there?”

There was a peculiar quality in Tommy Ashe’s tone, a something that was neither aloofness nor friendliness, nor anything that Wes Thompson could immediately classify.  But it was there, a something Tommy tried to suppress and still failed to suppress.  His words were hearty, but his manner was not.  And this he confirmed by his actions.  Thompson said that things over there were going well, and let it go at that.  He was more vitally concerned just then with over here.  But before he could fairly ask a question Tommy seized his hand and wrung it in farewell.

“Pardon my rush, old man,” he said.  “I’ve got an appointment I can’t afford to pass up, and I’m late already.  Look me up to-morrow, will you?”

Two years is long for some things, over-brief for others.  In Thompson those twenty-four months had softened certain perspectives.  He had quickened at sight of Tommy’s familiar face, albeit that face was a trifle grosser, more smugly complacent than he had ever expected to behold it.  He could mark the change more surely for the gap in time.  But Tommy had not been glad to see him.  Thompson felt that under the outward cordiality.