“I think I understand,” returned Carley.  “Then I suppose you’re in a hurry to get home?  Of course you have a girl you’re just dying to see?”

“No, I’m sorry to say I haven’t,” he replied, simply.  “I was glad I didn’t have to leave a sweetheart behind, when I went to France.  But it wouldn’t be so bad to have one to go back to now.”

“Don’t you worry!” exclaimed Carley.  “You can take your choice presently.  You have the open sesame to every real American girl’s heart.”

“And what is that?” he asked, with a blush.

“Your service to your country,” she said, gravely.

“Well,” he said, with a singular bluntness, “considering I didn’t get any medals or bonuses, I’d like to draw a nice girl.”

“You will,” replied Carley, and made haste to change the subject.  “By the way, did you meet Glenn Kilbourne in France?”

“Not that I remember,” rejoined Burton, as he got up, rising rather stiffly by aid of his cane.  “I must go, Miss Burch.  Really I can’t thank you enough.  And I’ll never forget it.”

“Will you write me how you are getting along?” asked Carley, offering her hand.

“Yes.”

Carley moved with him out into the hall and to the door.  There was a question she wanted to ask, but found it strangely difficult of utterance.  At the door Burton fixed a rather penetrating gaze upon her.

“You didn’t ask me about Rust,” he said.

“No, I—­I didn’t think of him—­until now, in fact,” Carley lied.

“Of course then you couldn’t have heard about him.  I was wondering.”

“I have heard nothing.”

“It was Rust who told me to come to you,” said Burton.  “We were talking one day, and he—­well, he thought you were true blue.  He said he knew you’d trust me and lend me money.  I couldn’t have asked you but for him.”

“True blue!  He believed that.  I’m glad. . . .  Has he spoken of me to you since I was last at the hospital?”

“Hardly,” replied Burton, with the straight, strange glance on her again.

Carley met this glance and suddenly a coldness seemed to envelop her.  It did not seem to come from within though her heart stopped beating.  Burton had not changed—­the warmth, the gratitude still lingered about him.  But the light of his eyes!  Carley had seen it in Glenn’s, in Rust’s—­a strange, questioning, far-off light, infinitely aloof and unutterably sad.  Then there came a lift of her heart that released a pang.  She whispered with dread, with a tremor, with an instinct of calamity.

“How about—­Rust?”

“He’s dead.”

The winter came, with its bleak sea winds and cold rains and blizzards of snow.  Carley did not go South.  She read and brooded, and gradually avoided all save those true friends who tolerated her.