He smiled a bit sardonically, for the thought arose also that in the Flying Corps the man who lost in aerial 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.

“What is the matter with you—­and dozens of men like you that I know?” she demanded in a choked voice.  “You stay at home living easy and getting rich in the security that other men are buying with their blood and their lives, over there.  Fighting against odds and dying like dogs in a ditch so that we can live here in peace and comfort.  You don’t even do anything useful here.  There doesn’t seem to be anything that can make you work or fight.  They can sink passenger ships and bomb undefended towns and shell hospitals, and you don’t seem to resent it.  I’ve heard you prate about service—­when you thought you walked with God and had a mission from God to show other men the way.  Why don’t you serve now?  What is the matter with you?  Is your skin so precious?  If you can’t fight, can’t you make ammunition or help to build ships?  Are you a man, or just a rabbit?  I wish to God I were a man.”

Thompson rose to his feet.  The lash of her tongue had not lost its power to sting since those far-off Lone Moose days.  Yet, though it stabbed like a spear, he was more conscious of a passionate craving to gather her into his arms than of anger and resentment.  There were tears in Sophie’s eyes—­but there was no softness in her tone.  Her red lips curled as Thompson looked at her in dazed silence.  There did not seem to be anything he could say—­not with Sophie looking at him like that.

“If you feel that way about it—­”

He broke off in the middle of the muttered sentence, turned on his heel, walked out of the room.  And he went down the street suffering from a species of shock, saying desperately to himself that it did not matter, nothing mattered.

But he knew that was a lie, a lie he told himself to keep his soul from growing sick.