Page:The Smart Set (Volume 51, Number 4).djvu/12

132 “Dearest Winifred: “I signed on as a despatch rider today and was told that I should be required to go out at once. I go tonight —how and where exactly 1 have not yet heard. Shall let you know when I have an address. I am sorry it was not possible to sce you before going. However, I expect it will be a short business.

“Yours very sincerely,

“Bertie Wright.”

And so it happened that she was to remember him always as he stood before her in the sunshine that afternoon on Leith Hill

III
Ta1s she did not see. A long, straight, narrow road, bordered with foplars, along which streamed an endess procession of weary, haggard infantry, white with dust, their faces turning every now and then toward a low, timbered ridge some two miles away across a stretch of sun-bathed fields. A farmhouse beside the road in flames, and in the middle of the pavé, just opposite the entrance to the farmhouse, two stretcher-bearers on their knees busy with a motionless figure. Leaning against the wall of the farmhouse a motor-bicycle, from the tank of which oil still dripped slowly.

“Shawn’t ’ave to carry 'im far,” said one of the stretcher-bearers. “’E’s as good as gone as it is. Hup!”

IV
He was lying in bed when she next saw him, toward the close of a wet afternoon in November. They had found one of her letters in the flap of his pay-book and had written to ask if she could furnish the names and addresses of any relatives.

He was asleep, so that at first she did not realize the greatness of his misfortune. His head was bandaged, and there were some healing scars on his unshaven face. She turned to the nurse in silent interrogation, and the nurse’s eyes, kindly evasive, at once awakened her suspicion.

“I—we are to be married,” she said steadily. *““Is he—is there any danger?”’

The nurse shook her head, hesitated for some instants, then, divining that here there was no likelihood of hysterics or fainting fits, spoke the succinct and dismaying truth.

“l am very sorry,” she said gently. “He is blind—and they have had to amputate his right arm. His head does not seem very clear—yet. But they think that will come all right.”

There was a long silence.

“Oh!” said Miss Barker at length, quietly.

She bent over the bed and kissed her boy’s lips.

“I won't wake him now,” she said, twisting her veil under her very adorable chin. “I shall come again tomorrow. Please don’t tell him that I came today.”

But next day she could not be sure that he even knew who she was; he seemed dazed and stupid, and when he did speak, spoke of things and people with unfamiliar names. a good deal, until an agony of pain fell upon him and caused him to moan incessantly until the time came for visitors to leave the hospital.

The nurses were very kind to her, and a wan-faced but cheery Highlander in the next cot to Bertie’s, who had lost both legs from the knee downward, made a stout-hearted attempt, by way of distraction, to show her his stumps.

In her room at the dreary little Station Hotel that evening Miss Barker cried undemonstratively at intervals of half an hour or so. It was quite clear to her that Bertie’s carcer as a useful, money-making, ornamental citizen was finished and done with. That right arm, even, might have been dispensed with; but blind … and … well … dull!

What was to be done with a man like that? What was to be done.

Ah! that careless sunlit afternoon on Leith Hill. Bertie. Her own, darling,