“I’ve seen you dance, my dear,” he reminded her, and saw how, with a deep-drawn breath, the memory of that night at Hickory Hill came back to her.

“Don’t,” she gasped.  “Let me go on.”  But it was the better part of a minute before she could.

“We sat out two or three dances together and then, when I might decently enough have passed him on to some one else with that same sort of explanatory look—­I didn’t.  Partly because of the feeling I have told you about and partly because I was attracted to him.  He was big and young and good-looking, and his voice—­oh, one can’t explain those things.  It wasn’t pure altruism.  That’s what you must see.  And then he got up suddenly and said, ‘Good-by.’  It was early, you know, and I asked him why he was going.  He said he wanted to get out of there.  Rather savagely.

“I got up too and said I felt the same way about it.  So he asked if he might ‘see me home.’  The dance was in the East Sixties.  There had been a shower but it was clear then and warm.  There weren’t any taxis about and, anyhow, he didn’t seem to think of looking for one, and we went over and took a Lexington Avenue car.  When we turned at Twenty-third Street I said we’d get out and walk.  He’d said hardly anything, but we had sat rather close in the car and he had been holding a fold of my cloak between his fingers.

“We went on down Lexington to Gramercy Park.  There was shrubbery in flower inside the iron fence and some of the trees had been leafing out that day and the air was very still and sweet.  We both stopped for a minute without saying anything and I slipped my hand farther through his arm and took his.

“He gave a sort of sob and said, ’You wouldn’t do that if you knew about me.’  I said, ‘You’d better tell me and see.’

“We walked on again, around the park and across Twentieth Street and down Fifth Avenue.  When we got to my door he hadn’t told me.

“My flat was just the second story of an old made-over house.  There was no one about, I mean, to stare or wonder, and I asked him to come in.  When we were inside I looked at my watch and asked him what time he had to report.  He said not until seven o’clock in the morning.  He was going over detached.  There was nothing but a hotel to go back to.

“If I’d asked him that question out on the sidewalk, and got that answer, I don’t know whether I’d have asked him in or not.

“He just stood looking at me for a minute after telling me he hadn’t anywhere to report that night.  Then he turned away and sat down on the edge of my couch and bent his face down on his hands and began to talk.  He told me what was the matter with him.  Of course, the same thing must have tormented thousands of them,—­the terror of being afraid.  He felt pretty sure he was a coward.

“Mostly, I think, that fear was pretty sensibly dealt with in this war.  It got talked out openly.  But he must have been a terribly lonely person.  He came from Iowa, but somehow he got sent to one of the southern cantonments, and had his officer’s training, such as it was, down there.  Then he was sent along to fill in somewhere else.  I don’t remember all the details.  He’d come to New York alone.  The men he had gone to the dance with he had only met that afternoon.