“Is Miss—­Mrs. Quintan at home?” he asked.

“Gone to Europe,” said the old woman.

“But Miss Latimer?” he persisted.

“Gone to Europe,” said the old woman.

“Mr. Howard Quintan?”

“Gone to Europe!”

He walked slowly down the steps, not even waiting to ask for their address abroad nor when they might be expected to return.  They had faded into the immeasurable distance.  What more was there to be said or hoped, and his dejected heart gave back the answer:  nothing.  He slept that night in a cheap hotel.  The next day he bought a suit of civilian clothes and sought the office of the auditor’s department.  Here he received something more like a welcome.  Many of the clerks, with whom he had scarcely been on nodding terms, now came up and shook him warmly by the hand.  The superintendent sent for him and told him that his place had been held open, hinting, in the exuberance of the moment, at a slight increase of salary.  The assistant superintendent made much of him and invited him out to lunch.  The old darkey door-keeper greeted him like a long-lost parent.  Raymond went back to his desk, and resumed with a sort of melancholy satisfaction the interrupted routine of twenty years.  In a week he could hardly believe he had ever quitted his desk.  He would shut his eyes and wonder whether the war had not been all a dream.  He looked at his hands and asked himself whether they indeed had pulled the lanyards of cannon, lifted loaded projectiles, had held the spokes of the leaping wheel.  His eyes, now intent on figures, had they in truth ever searched the manned decks of the enemy or trained the sights that had blown Spanish blockhouses to the four winds of heaven?  Had it been he or his ghost who had stood behind the Nordenfeldt shields with the bullets pattering against the steel and stinging the air overhead?  He or his ghost, barefoot in the sand that sopped the blood of fallen comrades, the ship shaking with the detonation of her guns, the hoarse cheering of her crew re-echoing in his half-deafened ears?  A dream, yes; tragic and wonderful in the retrospect, filled with wild, bright pictures; incredible, yet true!

He was restless and lonely.  He dreaded his evenings, which he knew not how to spend; dreaded the recurring Sunday, interminable in duration, whose leaden hours seemed never to reach their end.  His only solace was in his work, which took him out of himself and prevented him from thinking.  He made a weekly pilgrimage past the Quintans’ house.  The blinds were always drawn.  It was as dead as one of those Cuban mills, standing in the desolation of burned fields.  Once, greatly daring, and impelled by a sudden impulse, he went to the door and requested the address of his vanished friends: 

“Grand Hotel, Vevey, Switzerland.”  He repeated the words to himself as he went back to his boarding-house, repeated them again and again like a child going on an errand, “Grand Hotel, Vevey, Switzerland,” in a sort of panic lest he might forget them.  He tossed that night in his bed in a torment of indecision.  Ought he to write?  Ought he to take the risk of a reply, courteous and cold, that he felt himself without the courage to endure?  Or was it not better to put an end to it altogether and accept like a man the inevitable “no” of her decision.