Quin

								

wiped her eyes when no one was looking; Edwin and Myrna, solemnly
plucking their banjo and guitar, were lost in moods of dormant emotion;
while Papa Claude at the piano let his dim eyes range the pictured walls,
while his memory traveled back through the years on many a secret tryst
of its own.
But it was the lank Sergeant with the big feet, and the hair that stood
up where it shouldn't, who dared to dream the most preposterous dream of
them all. For, as he sang there in the firelight, a little god was busy
lighting the tapers in the most sacred shrines of his being, until he
felt like a cathedral at high mass with all the chimes going.



    "There's a long, long trail a-winding

      Into the land of my dreams,

    Where the nightingales are singing

      And a white moon beams."
How many times he had sung it in France!--jolting along muddy, endless
roads, heartsick, homesick.



    "There's a long, long night of waiting

      Until my dreams all come true,

    Till the day when I'll be going

      Down that long, long trail with you."
What had "you" meant to him then? A girl--a pretty girl, of course; but
any girl. And now?
Ah, now he knew what he had been going toward, not only on those terrible
roads in France, but all through the years of his life. An exquisite,
imperious little officer's girl with divinely compassionate eyes, who
wasn't ashamed to dance with a private, and who had let him hold her hand
at parting while she said in accents an angel might have envied,
"Good-by, Soldier Boy."
Quin sighed profoundly and slipped his arm under his head, and at the
same moment the owner of the knee upon which he was leaning also heaved a
sigh and shifted her position, and somehow in the adjustment two lonely
hands came in contact and evidently decided that, after all, substitutes
were some comfort.
It was not until all the whistles in town had announced the birth of the
New Year that the party broke up, and it was not until then that Quin
realized that he was very tired, and that his pulse was behaving in a way
that was, alas, all too familiar.

                              CHAPTER 3

Friday after New Year's found Sergeant Graham again flat on his back at
the Base Hospital, facing sentence of three additional weeks in bed. In
vain had he risked a reprimand by hotly protesting the point with the
Captain; in vain had he declared to the nurse that he would rather live
on his feet than die on his back. Judgment was passed, and he lay with an
ice-bag on his head and a thermometer in his mouth and hot rage in his
heart.
What made matters worse was that Cass Martel had come over from the
Convalescent Barracks only that morning to announce that he had received
his discharge and was going home. To Quin it seemed that everybody but
himself was going home--that is, everybody but the incurables. At that
thought a dozen nameless fears that had been tormenting him of late all