“My work here is, as you would say, ‘wonderful.’  How I should like to hear you say it!  There are things which in all my years of practice, I have never met before.  How could I meet them?  It has taken this generation of doctors to wrestle with the problem of treating men tortured by gas, and with nerves shaken by sights and sounds without parallel in the history of the world.

“But I am not going to tell you of it.  I would rather tell you how much I love you and miss you, and how glad I am that you are not here to see it all.  Yet I would have all Americans think of those who are here, and I would have you help until it—­hurts.  You must know, my Jean, how moved I am by it, when I ask you, whom I have always shielded, to give help until it hurts—­

“I have had a letter from Hilda.  She wants to come over.  I haven’t answered the letter.  But when I do, I shall tell her that there may be something that she can do, but it will not be with me.  I need women who can see the pathos of such things as that starved cat and kittens out there among the shell-holes, and Hilda would never have seen it.  She would have left the cat to starve.”

Jean found herself crying over the letter.  “I am not helping at all, Derry.”

“My dear, you are.”

“I am not.  I am just sitting on a pink cushion, like Polly Ann—–­”

It was the first flash he had seen for days of her girlish petulance.  He smiled.  “That sounds like the Jean of yesterday.”

“Did you like the Jean of yesterday better than the Jean of to-day?”

“There is only one Jean for me—­yesterday, today and forever.”

* * * * * *

She stood a little away from him.  “Derry, I’ve been thinking and thinking—­”

He put a finger under her chin and turned her face up to him.  “What have you been thinking, Jean-Joan?”

“That you must go—­and I will take care of your father.”

“You?”

“Yes.  Why not, Derry?”

“I won’t have you sacrificed.”

“But you want me to be brave.”

“Yes.  But not burdened.  I won’t have it, my dear.”

“But—­you promised your mother.  I am sure she would be glad to let me keep your promise.”

She was brave now.  Braver than he knew.

“I can’t see it,” he said, fiercely.  “I can see myself leaving you with Emily, in your own house—­to live your own life.  But not to sit in Dad’s room, day after day, sacrificing your youth as I sacrificed my childhood and boyhood—­my manhood—.  I am over thirty, Jean, and I have always been treated like a boy.  It isn’t right, Jean; our lives are our own, not his.”

“It is right.  Nobody’s life seems to be his own in these days.  And you must go—­and I can’t leave him.  He is so old, and helpless, Derry, like the poor pussy-cat over there in France.  His eyes are like that—­hungry, and they beg—.  And oh, Derry, I mustn’t be like Polly Ann, on a pink cushion—.”