“An actress!” she cried, sitting bolt upright. “Du lieber—­an actress!”

“Not an actress,” he corrected her gravely.  “A—­a dancer.  But good.  She’s a very good girl.  Even when I was—­was whole”—­raging bitterness there—­“I was not good enough for her.”

“No actress is good.  And dancers!”

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” he said roughly, and turned his back to her.  It was almost insulting to have her assist him to his attitude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows behind his back.  Lying there he tried hard to remember that this woman belonged to his hereditary foes.  He was succeeding in hating her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.

“Poor boy!  Poor little one!” she said.  And her voice was husky.

When at last he was moved from the hospital to the prison camp she pinned the sleeve of his ragged uniform across his chest and kissed him, to his great discomfiture.  Then she went to the curtained corner that was her quarters and wept long and silently.

The prison camp was overcrowded.  Early morning and late evening prisoners were lined up to be counted.  There was a medley of languages—­French, English, Arabic, Russian.  The barracks were built round a muddy inclosure in which the men took what exercise they could.

One night a boy with a beautiful tenor voice sang Auld Lang Syne under the boy’s window.  He stood with his hand on the cuff of his empty sleeves and listened.  And suddenly a great shame filled him, that with so many gone forever, with men dying every minute of every hour, back at the lines, he had been so obsessed with himself.  He was still bitter, but the bitterness was that he could not go back again and fight.

When he had been in the camp a month he helped two British officers to escape.  One of them had snubbed him in London months before.  He apologised before he left.

“You’re a man, Hamilton,” he said.  “All you Canadians are men.  I’ve some things to tell when I get home.”

The boy could not go with them.  There would be canals to swim across, and there was his empty sleeve and weakness.  He would never swim again, he thought.  That night, as he looked at the empty beds of the men who had gone, he remembered his medals and smiled grimly.

He was learning to use his left hand.  He wrote letters home with it for soldiers who could not write.  He went into the prison hospital and wrote letters for those who would never go home.  But he did not write to the girl.

* * * * *

He went back at last, when the hopelessly wounded were exchanged.  To be branded “hopelessly wounded” was to him a stain, a stigma.  It put him among the clutterers of the earth.  It stranded him on the shore of life.  Hopelessly wounded!

For, except what would never be whole, he was well again.  True, confinement and poor food had kept him weak and white.  His legs had a way of going shaky at nightfall.  But once he knocked down an insolent Russian with his left hand, and began to feel his own man again.  That the Russian was weak from starvation did not matter.  The point to the boy was that he had made the attempt.