d you, day after day, hoping you would speak of
your own free will. I have hated to urge you. It seemed rather
beastly to drive you into telling me things that are none of my
business. But they are my business, in a sense. There's nobody in
all South Africa who can go back farther with you into the past.
That alone ought to count for something."

Handsome still, in spite of his dark sunburn and his time-stained
khaki, Carew's face was wonderfully attractive, as it looked into
that of his friend. Weldon felt the attraction, even while he was
wondering why it was so powerless to move him. He liked Carew; since
the death of the Captain, no other man was linked more closely with
his life. Nevertheless, Carew's words left him cold. All things did
leave him cold of late. It was as if, in the fierce conflagration of
that one hour in the Johannesburg hospital, the fires of his nature
had burned themselves out beyond the possibility of being rekindled.
His intellect told him that Carew was in the right of it, that his
alternatives were speech or madness; but he faced the alternatives
with an absolute indifference. His intellect also told him that, for
the past three weeks, Carew's kindness had been unremitting; that
his care had served as a buffer between himself and the clumsy
tactlessness of their mates; that his sympathy now was leading him
to try to storm the barrier of his own reserve; but he met Carew's
advances with an icy front which could be thawed neither from
outside nor from within. It was not his will to be ungrateful; it
was beyond his present power to show the gratitude which he really
felt. And Carew, with the supreme insight which marks the friendship
of men at times, interpreted Weldon's mood aright and forebode to
take offence.

Nevertheless, watching his friend closely, Carew had judged the case
to be serious. He had felt no surprise at the state of collapse in
which Weldon had struggled back into camp. The battle, the half-dressed
wounds, the nerve-racking journey, the watching the slow
approach of death and the accepting the fact of the loss of a valued
friend: all these were enough to wreck the vitality of a man. With
an almost womanish tenderness, Carew had brought his friend back to
the tent, and made him over to the care of Paddy who gave up all
things else, for the sake of his little Canuck. All that afternoon
and night, Weldon lay passive, inert, while Paddy bathed him, fed
him, poured cool, soft t