" He turned
quickly, shooting out a hand and gripping hers hard. "Tell me; you've seen
all sorts of operations--horrible ones, where they take out great pieces
of malignant stuff that is eating the life out of a man. You've seen
that?"

The nurse nodded.

"Did you forget it afterward, when the body was clean and whole again?
Could you forget the thing that had been there? For that's war. That's
what we're fighting, the thing that's eating into the heart of a decent,
sound world, and since I've seen the horror of it I can't forget. I can't
see the healing--yet."

"You will. Not at first, perhaps, but when you're stronger. That is one of
God's blessed plans: He made beauty to be immortal and ugliness to die and
be forgotten. And even the scars where ugliness was time whitens and
obliterates. Give time its chance."

It was the next day that the boy spoke of Clarisse. "Will time make them
all right, too? Leerie," he had picked up the nickname from the other
nurses and appropriated it with all the ardent affection of worshiping
youth, "we're miles--ages--apart. Can anything under God's canopy bring us
together, I wonder?"

"Perhaps." Sheila smiled her old inscrutable smile. "Tell me more."

And so he told her of the girl who was so young, and oh, so pretty. It had
all seemed right before he had gone to camp; it was the great love for
him, something that had made his going seem the worthier. But at camp the
distance between them had begun to widen, her letters had failed to bridge
it, and through those letters he had discovered a new angle of her, an
angle so acute that it had cut straight to the heart and destroyed all the
love that had been there. At least that was what he thought.

"I knew she was young, of course, not much more than a child, and I knew
she loved fun and good times, and all that, but--Why, she'd write about
week-end parties, and how becoming her bathing-suit was, and what Tommy
Flint said about her fox-trotting. Lord!" He writhed under the coverlet
and ground his nails into his palms. "We marched through places where
there wasn't a shred of anything left for anybody. We saw old women
hanging on to broken platters and empty bird-cages because it was all they
had left--home, children, everything gone. And on top of that would come a
letter telling how much she'd spent on an evening gown, and how Bob Wylie
took them out to Riverdale and blew in a hundred and twenty dollars on the
day's trip. A hundred