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"Silly asses!" said Graham, again, and then she saw him. There was no question about her being pleased. She was quite flushed with it, but a little uncomfortable, too, at Graham's attitude. He was oddly humble, and yet he had a look of determination that was almost grim. She filled in a rather disquieting silence by trying to let him know, without revealing that she had ever been anything else, how proud she was of him. Then she realized that he was not listening, and that he was looking at her with an almost painful intensity.

"When can you get away, Delight?" he asked abruptly.

"From here?" She cast an appraising glance over the room. "Right away, I think. Why?"

"Because I want to talk to you, and I can't talk to you here."

She brought a bright colored sweater and he helped her into it, still with his mouth set and his eyes a trifle sunken. All about there were laughing groups of men in uniform. Outside, the parade glowed faintly in the dusk, and from the low barrack windows there came the glow of lights, the movement of young figures, voices, the thin metallic notes of a mandolin.

"How strange it all is," Delight said. "Here we are, you and father and myself - and even Jackson. I saw him to-day. All here, living different lives, doing different things, even thinking different thoughts. It's as though we had all moved into a different world."

He walked on beside her, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were yet only of her.

"I didn't know you were here," he brought out finally.

"That's because you've been burying yourself. I knew you were here."

"Why didn't you send me some word?"

She stiffened somewhat in the darkness.

"I didn't think you would be greatly interested, Graham."

And again, struggling with his new humility, he was silent. It was not until they had crossed the parade ground and were beyond the noises of the barracks that he spoke again.

"Do you mind if I talk to you, Delight? I mean, about myself? I - since you're here, we're likely to see each other now and then, if you are willing. And I'd like to start straight."

"Do you really want to tell me?"

"No. But I've got to. That's all."

He told her. He made no case for himself. Indeed, some of it Delight understood far better than he did himself. He said nothing against Marion; on the contrary, he blamed himself rather severely. And behind his honest, halting sentences, Delight read his own lack of understanding. She felt infinitely older than this tall, honest-eyed boy in his stained uniform - older and more sophisticated. But if she had understood the Marion Hayden situation, she was totally at a loss as to Anna.

"But I don't understand!" she cried. "How could you make love to her if you didn't love her?"

"I don't know. Fellows do those things. It's just mischief - some sort of a devil in them, I suppose."

When he reached the beating and Anna's flight, however, she understood a little better.

"Of course you had to stand by her," she agreed.

"You haven't heard it all," he said quietly. "When I'm through, if you get up and leave me, I'll understand, Delight, and I won't blame you."

He told her the rest of the story in a voice strained with anxiety. It was as though he had come to a tribunal for judgment. He spared her nothing, the dinner at the road-house with Rudolph at the window, his visit to Anna's room, and her subsequent disappearance.

"She told the Department of Justice people that Rudolph found her that night, and, took her home. She was a prisoner then, poor little kid. But she overheard her father and Rudolph plotting to blow up the mill. That's where I came in, Delight. He was crazy at me. He was a German, of course, and he might have done it anyhow. But Rudolph told him a lot of lies about me, and - he did it. When I think about it all, and about Joey, I'm crazy."

She slipped her hand over his.

"Of course they would have done it anyhow," she said softly.

"You aren't going to get up and go away?"

"Why should I?" she asked. "I only feel - oh,