Page:Buttered Side Down.djvu/242

 yard which it was his Saturday duty to mow that it might be trim and sightly for Sunday—of the boys and girls who used to drop in at the drug store—those clear-eyed, innocently coquettish, giggling, blushing girls in their middy blouses and white skirts, their slender arms and throats browned from tennis and boating, their eyes smiling into his as they sat perched at the fountain after a hot set of tennis—those slim, clean young boys, sun-browned, laughing, their talk all of swimming, and boating, and tennis, and girls.

He did not realize that it was desertion—that thought that grew and grew in his mind. In it there was nothing of faithlessness to his country. He was only trying to be true to himself, and to the things that his mother had taught him. He only knew that he was deadly sick of these sights of disease, and vice. He only knew that he wanted to get away—back to his own decent life with the decent people to whom he belonged. And he went. He went, as a child runs home when it had tripped and fallen in the mud, not dreaming of wrong-doing or punishment.

The first few hundred miles on the train were