Lily glanced up as he stopped.  She had drawn off her gloves, and his eyes had fallen on her engagement ring.  To Lily there had always been a feeling of unreality about his declaration of love for her.  He had been so restrained, so careful to ask nothing in exchange, so without expectation of return, that she had put it out of her mind as an impulse.  She had not dreamed that he could still care, after these months of silence.  But he had gone quite white.

“I am going to be married, Willy,” she said, in a low tone.  It is doubtful if he could have spoken, just then.  And as if to add a finishing touch of burlesque to the meeting, a small boy with a swollen jaw came in just then and demanded something to “make it stop hurting.”

He welcomed the interruption, she saw.  He was very professional instantly, and so absorbed for a moment in relieving the child’s pain that he could ignore his own.

“Let’s see it,” he said in a businesslike, slightly strained voice.  “Better have it out, old chap.  But I’ll give you something just to ease it up a bit.”

Which he proceeded to do.  When he came back to Lily he was quite calm and self-possessed.  As he had never thought of dramatizing himself, nor thought of himself at all, it did not occur to him that drama requires setting, that tragedy required black velvet rather than tooth-brushes, and that a small boy with an aching tooth was a comedy relief badly introduced.

All he knew was that he had somehow achieved a moment in which to steady himself, and to find that a man can suffer horribly and still smile.  He did that, very gravely, when he came back to Lily.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“There is not very much to tell.  It is Louis Akers.”

The middle-aged clerk had disappeared.

“Of course you have thought over what that means, Lily.”

“He wants me to marry him.  He wants it very much, Willy.  And—­I know you don’t like him, but he has changed.  Women always think they have changed men, I know.  But he is very different.”

“I am sure of that,” he said, steadily.

There was something childish about her, he thought.  Childish and infinitely touching.  He remembered a night at the camp, when some of the troops had departed for over-seas, and he had found her alone and crying in her hut.  “I just can’t let them go,” she had sobbed.  “I just can’t.  Some of them will never come back.”

Wasn’t there something of that spirit in her now, the feeling that she could not let Akers go, lest worse befall him?  He did not know.  All he knew was that she was more like the Lily Cardew he had known then than she had been since her return.  And that he worshiped her.

But there was anger in him, too.  Anger at Anthony Cardew.  Anger at the Doyles.  And a smoldering, bitter anger at Louis Akers, that he should take the dregs of his life and offer them to her as new wine.  That he should dare to link his scheming, plotting days to this girl, so wise and yet so ignorant, so clear-eyed and yet so blind.