“Wait!” she cried.  “Don’t you think I’m willing to suffer a little rather than to see my country in the wrong?  Don’t you think I’m doing it?”

“Well, I don’t want to be rude; but, of course, it seems to me that you’re suffering because you think you know more about what’s right and wrong than anybody else does.”

“Oh, no.  But I—­”

“We wouldn’t get anywhere, probably, by arguing it,” Fred said.  “You asked me.”

“I asked you to tell my why he enlisted.”

“The trouble is, I don’t think I can tell that to anybody who needs an answer.  He just went, of course.  There isn’t any question about it.  I always thought he’d be the first to go.”

“Oh, no!” she said.

“Yes, I always thought so.”

“I think you were mistaken,” she said, decidedly.  “It was a special reason—­to make him act so cruelly.”

“Cruelly!” Fred cried.

“It was!”

“Cruel to whom?”

“Oh, to his mother—­to his family.  To have him go off that way, without a word—­”

“Oh, no’ he’d been home,” Fred corrected her.  “He went home the Saturday before he enlisted, and settled it with them.  They’re all broken up, of course; but when the saw he’d made up his mind, they quit opposing him, and I think they’re proud of him about it, maybe, in spite of feeling anxious.  You see, his father was an artilleryman in the war with Spain, and his grandfather was a Colonel at the end of the War of the Rebellion, though he went into it as a private, like Ramsey.  He died when Ramsey was about twelve; but Ramsey remembers him; he was talking of him a little the night before he enlisted.”

Dora made a gesture of despairing protest.  “You don’t understand!”

“What is it I don’t understand?”

“Ramsey! I know why he went—­and it’s just killing me!”

Fred looked at her gravely.  “I don’t think you need worry about it,” he said.  “There’s nothing about his going that you are responsible for.”

She repeated her despairing gesture.  “You don’t understand.  But it’s no use.  It doesn’t help any to try to talk of it, though I thought maybe it would, somehow.”  She went a little nearer the dormitory entrance, leaving him where he was, then turned.  “I suppose you won’t see him?”

“I don’t know.  Most probably not till we meet-if we should—­in France.  I don’t know where he’s stationed; and I’m going with the aviation—­if it’s ever ready!  And he’s with the regulars; he’ll probably be among the first to go over.”

“I see.”  She turned sharply away, calling back over her shoulder in a choked voice.  “Thank you.  Good-bye!”

But Fred’s heart had melted; gazing after her, he saw that her proud young head had lowered now, and that her shoulders were moving convulsively; he ran after her and caught her as she began slowly to ascend the dormitory steps.

“See here,” he cried.  “Don’t—­”