But they had refused him.

“They won’t use me, mother,” he had said when he got home, home being a small neat house on a tidy street of a little country town.  “I tried every branch, but the only training I’ve had—­well, some smart kid said they weren’t planning to serve soda water to the army.  They didn’t want cripples, you see.”

“I wish you wouldn’t, Willy.”

He had been frightfully sorry then and had comforted her at some length, but the fact remained.

“And you the very best they’ve ever had for mixing prescriptions!” she had said at last.  “And a graduate in chemistry!”

“Well,” he said, “that’s that, and we won’t worry about it.  There’s more than one way of killing a cat.”

“What do you mean, Willy?  More than one way?”

There was no light of prophecy in William Wallace Cameron’s gray eyes, however, when he replied:  “More than one way of serving my country.  Don’t you worry.  I’ll find something.”

So he had, and he had come out of his Red Cross work in the camp with one or two things in his heart that had not been there before.  One was a knowledge of men.  He could not have put into words what he felt about men.  It was something about the fundamental simplicity of them, for one thing.  You got pretty close to them at night sometimes, especially when the homesick ones had gone to bed, and the phonograph was playing in a corner of the long, dim room.  There were some shame-faced tears hidden under army blankets those nights, and Willy Cameron did some blinking on his own account.

Then, under all the blasphemy, the talk about women, the surface sordidness of their daily lives and thoughts, there was one instinct common to all, one love, one hidden purity.  And the keyword to those depths was “home.”

“Home,” he said one day to Lily Cardew.  “Mostly it’s the home they’ve left, and maybe they didn’t think so much of it then.  But they do now.  And if it isn’t that, it’s the home they want to have some day.”  He looked at Lily.  Sometimes she smiled at things he said, and if she had not been grave he would not have gone on.  “You know,” he continued, “there’s mostly a girl some place.  All this talk about the nation, now—­” He settled himself on the edge of the pine table where old Anthony Cardew’s granddaughter had been figuring up her week’s accounts, and lighted his pipe, “the nation’s too big for us to understand.  But what is the nation, but a bunch of homes?”

“Willy dear,” said Lily Cardew, “did you take any money out of the cigar box for anything this week?”

“Dollar sixty-five for lard,” replied Willy dear.  “As I was saying, we’ve got to think of this country in terms of homes.  Not palaces like yours—­”

“Good gracious!” said Lily, “I don’t live in a palace.  Get my pocket-book, will you?  I’m out three dollars somehow, and I’d rather make it up myself than add these figures over again.  Go on and talk, Willy.  I love hearing you.”