The Royal Flying Corps arrives at its ends slowly. Perhaps not too

slowly for the niceness of choice that must be made. Presently there

came to Wesley Thompson a brief order to report at a training camp in

Eastern Canada.

When he held this paper in his hand and knew himself committed

irrevocably to the greatest game of all, he felt a queer, inner glow, a

quiet satisfaction such as must come to a man who succeeds in some high

enterprise. Thompson felt this in spite of desperate facts. He had no

illusions as to what he had set about. He knew very well that in the

R.F.C. it was a short life and not always a merry one. Of course a man

might be lucky. He might survive by superior skill. In any case it had

to be done.

But he was moved likewise by a strange loneliness, and with his orders

in his hand he understood at last the source of that peculiar regret

which latterly had assailed him in stray moments. There were a few

friends to bid good-by. And chief, if she came last on his round of

calls that last day, was Sophie Carr.

He found Sophie at home about four in the afternoon, sitting in the big

living room, making Red Cross bandages. She did not stop her work when

he was ushered in. Beside her on a table stood a flat box and in this

from time to time she put a finished roll. It occurred to Thompson that

sometime one of those white bandages fabricated by her hands might be

used on him.

He smiled a bit sardonically, for the thought arose also that in the

Flying Corps the man who lost in aërial combat needed little besides a

coffin--and sometimes not even that.

Sophie looked at him almost somberly.

"I'm working, don't you see?" she said curtly.

He had never seen her in quite that unapproachable mood. He wanted her

to forget the Red Cross and the war for a little while, to look and

speak with the old lightness. He wasn't a sentimental man, but he did

want to go away with a picture of her smiling. He had not told her he

was going. He did not mean to tell her till he was leaving, and then

only to say casually: "Well, good-by. I'm off for a training-camp

to-night." He had always suspected there was something of the Spartan in

Sophie Carr's make-up. Even if he had not divined that, he had no

intention of making a fuss about his going, of trying to pose as a hero.

But he was a normal man, and he wanted his last recollection of her--if

it should be his last--to be a pleasant one.

And Sophie was looking at him now, fixedly, a frosty gleam in her gray

eyes. She looked a moment, and her breast heaved. She swept the work off

her lap with a sudden, swift gesture.




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