"Ah, the doctors!" he broke in, shrugging his shoulders. "They were all jolly good fellows. All you had to do was to even hint that you'd been knocked over by a shell that exploded two hundred yards away and--zip! they'd send you back for repairs. As for myself, the only reason I didn't like to talk about my condition at first was because it hurt my throat and lungs. It wasn't because I was afflicted with this heroic melancholy they talk so much about. I was mighty glad to be alive. I couldn't see anything to mope about,--certainly not after I found out I wasn't going to die." "I daresay there were others who took it as you did. I wish there could have been more." He hesitated a moment before speaking again. Then he hazarded the question: "What does your friend, Dr. Strong, have to say about the general run of such cases?" "I don't know. I have not seen Dr. Strong since the war ended." He looked mildly surprised. "Hasn't he been home since the war?" "I believe so. I was away at the time." "How long was he in France?" "He went over first in 1916 and again in the fall of 1917, and remained till the end of the war. His mother is here with me, you know." "Yes, I know. By Jove, I envy him one thing,--lucky dog." She remained silent. "You were playmates, weren't you?" "Yes," she said, lifting her chin slightly. "Well, that's why I envy him. To have been your playmate,--Why, I envy him every minute of his boyhood. When I think of my own boyhood and how little there was to it that a real boy should have, I--I--confound it, I almost find myself hating chaps like Strong, chaps who lived in the country and had regular pals, and girl sweethearts, and went fishing and hunting, and played hookey as it ought to be played, and grew up with something fine and sweet and wholesome to look back upon,--and to have had you for a playmate,--maybe a sweetheart,--you in short frocks, with your hair in pigtails, barefooted in summertime, running--" She interrupted him. "Your imagination is at fault there, Mr. Thane," she said, smiling once more. "I never went barefooted in my life." "At any rate, HE did. And he played all sorts of games with you; he--" "My impression of David Strong is that he was a boy's boy," she broke in rather stiffly. "His games were with the boys of the town,--and they were rough games. Football, baseball, shinney, circus,--things like that." "I don't mean sports, Miss Crown. I was thinking of those wonderful boy and girl games,--such as 'playing house,' 'getting married,' 'hide-and-go-seek,'--all that sort of thing." "Yes, I know," she admitted. "We often played at getting married, and we had very large but inanimate families, and we quarrelled like real married people, and I used to cry and take my playthings home, and he used to stand outside our fence and make faces at me till I hated him ferociously. But all that was when we were very small, you see."