“But,” she said to him, visiting him one day in the base hospital, where he was still an aching, mass of bruises, “there must be something behind it.  They didn’t hate me.  They only hated my—­ well, my family.”

“My dear child,” said Willy Cameron, feeling very old and experienced, and, it must be confessed, extremely happy, “of course there’s something behind it.  But the most that’s behind it is a lot of fellows who want without working what the other fellow’s worked to get.”

It was about that time that Lily was exchanged into the town near the camp, and Willy Cameron suddenly found life a stale thing, and ashes in the mouth.  He finally decided that he had not been such a hopeless fool as to fall in love with her, but that it would be as well not to see her too much.

“The thing to do,” he reasoned to himself, “is, first of all, not to see her.  Or only on Friday nights, because she likes the movies, and it would look queer to stop.”  Thus Willy Cameron speciously to himself, and deliberately ignoring the fact that some twenty-odd officers stood ready to seize those Friday nights.  “And then to work hard, so I’ll sleep better, and not lie awake making a fool of myself.  And when I get a bit of idiocy in the daytime, I’d better just walk it off.  Because I’ve got to live with myself a long time, probably, and I’m no love-sick Romeo.”

Which excellent practical advice had cost him considerable shoe-leather at first.  In a month or two, however, he considered himself quite cured, and pretended to himself that he was surprised to find it Friday again.  But when, after retreat, the band marched back again to its quarters playing, for instance, “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” there was something inside him that insisted on seeing the years ahead as a long, long trail, and that the trail did not lead to the lands of his dreams.

He got to know that very well indeed during the winter that followed the armistice.  Because there was work to do he stayed and finished up, as did Lily Cardew.  But the hut was closed and she was working in the town, and although they kept up their Friday evenings, the old intimacy was gone.  And one night she said: 

“Isn’t it amazing, when you are busy, how soon Friday night comes along?”

And on each day of the preceding week he had wakened and said to himself:  “This is Monday—­“—­or whatever it might be—­“and in four more days it will be Friday.”

In February he was sent home.  Lily stayed on until the end of March.  He went back to his little village of plain people, and took up life again as best he could.  But sometimes it seemed to him that from behind every fire-lit window in the evenings—­he was still wearing out shoe-leather, particularly at nights—­somebody with a mandolin was wailing about the long, long trail.

His mother watched him anxiously.  He was thinner than ever, and oddly older, and there was a hollow look about his eyes that hurt her.