“I’m sorry,” she said.  And some subconscious memory of Mabel made her say:  “It’s fierce!”

The girl looked at her.

“That young officer you’re with, he’s going, of course.  He seems very young.  My brother was older.  Thirty.”

“He’s twenty-two.”

“He has such nice eyes,” said the girl.  “I wish——­”

But he was coming back, and she slipped away.

During tea Cecil caught her eyes on him more than once.  He had taken off his stiff-crowned cap, and the wind blew his dark hair round.

“I wish you were not going to the war,” she said unexpectedly.  It had come home to her, all at once, the potentialities of that trim uniform.  It made her a little sick.

“It’s nice of you to say that.”

There was a new mood on her, of confession, almost of consecration.  He asked her if he might smoke.  No one in her brief life had ever before asked her permission to smoke.

“I’ll have to smoke all I can,” he said.  “The fellows say cigarettes are scarce in the trenches.  I’m taking a lot over.”

He knew a girl who smoked cigarettes, he said.  She was a nice girl too.  He couldn’t understand it.  The way he felt about it, maybe a cigarette for a girl wasn’t a crime.  But it led to other things—­drinking, you know, and all that.

“The fellows don’t respect a girl that smokes,” he said.  “That’s the plain truth.  I’ve talked to her a lot about it.”

“It wasn’t your friend in Toronto, was it?”

“Good heavens, no!” He repudiated the idea with horror.

It was the girl who had to readjust her ideas of life that day.  She had been born and raised in that neutral ground between the lines of right and wrong, and now suddenly her position was attacked and she must choose sides.  She chose.

“I’ve smoked a cigarette now and then.  If you think it is wrong I’ll not do it any more.”

He was almost overcome, both at the confession and at her renunciation.  To tell the truth, among the older Canadian officers he had felt rather a boy.  Her promise reinstated him in his own esteem.  He was a man, and a girl was offering to give something up if he wished it.  It helped a lot.

That evening he laid out his entire equipment in his small cabin, and invited her to see it.  He put his mother’s picture behind his brushes, where the other one had been, and when all was ready he rang for a stewardess.

“I am going to show a young lady some of my stuff,” he explained.  “And as she is alone I wish you’d stay round, will you?  I want her to feel perfectly comfortable.”

The stewardess agreed, and as she was an elderly woman, with a son at the front, a boy like Cecil, she went back to her close little room over the engines and cried a little, very quietly.

It was unfortunate that he did not explain the presence of the stewardess to the girl.  For when it was all over, and she had stood rather awed before his mother’s picture, and rather to his surprise had smoothed her hair with one of his brushes, she turned to him outside the door.