He was getting incoherent, and he knew it, and stopped a moment.

“It’s you, Judith——­”

He stopped again, and with a painful effort went on slowly—­slowly and quietly, and the girl, without a word, stood still, looking down at him.

“I—­used—­to—­think—­that—­I—­loved—­you.  I—­used—­to—­think I was—­a—­man.  I didn’t know what love was, and I didn’t know what it was to be a man.  I know both now, thank God, and learning each has helped me to learn the other.  If I killed all your feeling for me, I deserve the loss; but you must have known, Judith, that I was not myself that night.  You did know.  Your instinct told you the truth; you—­knew—­I loved—­you—­then—­and that’s why—­that’s why—­you—­God bless you—­said—­what—­you—­did.  To think that I should ever dare to open my lips again! but I can’t help it; I can’t help it.  I was crazy, Judith—­crazy—­and I am now; but it didn’t go and then come back.  It never went at all, as I found out, going down to Cuba—­and yes, it did come back; but it was a thousand times higher and better love than it had ever been, for everything came back and I was a better man.  I have seen nothing but your face all the time—­nothing—­nothing, all the time I’ve been gone; and I couldn’t rest or sleep—­I couldn’t even die, Judith, until I had come to tell you that I never knew a man could love a woman as—­I—­love—­you—­Judith.  I——­”

He rose very slowly, turned, and as he passed from the light, his weakness got the better of him for the first time, because of his wounds and sickness, and his voice broke in a half sob—­the sob that is so terrible to a woman’s ears; and she saw him clinch his arms fiercely around his breast to stifle it.

* * * * *

It was the old story that night—­the story of the summer’s heat and horror and suffering—­heard and seen, and keenly felt in his delirium:  the dusty, grimy days of drill on the hot sands of Tampa; the long, long, hot wait on the transport in the harbour; the stuffy, ill-smelling breath of the hold, when the wind was wrong; the march along the coast and the grewsome life over and around him—­buzzard and strange bird in the air, and crab and snail and lizard and scorpion and hairy tarantula scuttling through the tropical green rushes along the path.  And the hunger and thirst and heat and dirt and rolling sweat of the last day’s march and every detail of the day’s fight; the stench of dead horse and dead man; the shriek of shell and rattle of musketry and yell of officer; the slow rush through the long grass, and the climb up the hill.  And always, he was tramping, tramping, tramping through long, green, thick grass.  Sometimes a kaleidoscope series of pictures would go jumbling through his brain, as though some imp were unrolling the scroll of his brain backward, forward, and sidewise; a whirling cloud of sand, a driving sheet of visible bullets; a hose-pipe that shot streams of melted steel; a forest of smokestacks;