He did not know what an effort it took to keep her voice from quavering, her hand from trembling as it rested on the onyx top of the table. "I'm sorry," he said a second time. "Perhaps it's our fault. Perhaps we haven't been ... friendly enough." The lifted eyes went straight into his. He found an answer unexpectedly difficult. "No man ever had more generous friends," he said at last brusquely, his face set hard. The girl guessed at the tense feeling back of his words. "Let's walk," she replied, and he noticed that the eyes and mouth had softened to a tender smile. "I can't talk here, Dave." They made a pretense of finishing their sodas, then walked out of the town into the golden autumn sunlight of the foothills. Neither of them spoke. She carried herself buoyantly, chin up, her face a flushed cameo of loveliness. As she took the uphill trail a small breath of wind wrapped the white skirt about her slender limbs. He found in her a new note, one of unaccustomed shyness. The silence grew at last too significant. She was driven to break it. "I suppose I'm foolish," she began haltingly. "But I had been expecting--all of us had--that when you came home from--from Denver--the first time, I mean--you would be the old Dave Sanders we all knew and liked. We wanted our friendship to--to help make up to you for what you must have suffered. We didn't think you'd hold us off like this." His eyes narrowed. He looked away at the cedars on the hills painted in lustrous blues and greens and purples, and at the slopes below burnt to exquisite color lights by the fires of fall. But what he saw was a gray prison wall with armed men in the towers. "If I could tell you!" He said it in a whisper, to himself, but she just caught the words. "Won't you try?" she said, ever so gently. He could not sully her innocence by telling of the furtive whisperings that had fouled the prison life, made of it an experience degrading and corrosive. He told her, instead, of the externals of that existence, of how he had risen, dressed, eaten, worked, exercised, and slept under orders. He described to her the cells, four by seven by seven, barred, built in tiers, faced by narrow iron balconies, each containing a stool, a chair, a shelf, a bunk. In his effort to show her the chasm that separated him from her he did not spare himself at all. Dryly and in clean-cut strokes he showed her the sordidness of which he had been the victim and left her to judge for herself of its evil effect on his character. When he had finished he knew that he had failed. She wept for pity and murmured, "You poor boy.... You poor boy!"