He had dropped at once into his place, exactly as if he had never been away at all—as if, after his graduation, he had come home to practise his profession. There was nothing even about his house to indicate the traveler; no obtrusive trophies of strange lands; no bizarre knick-knacks. In a room in the attic were a half-full dunnage-bag, a traveler’s kit, and an officer’s trunk, small size, the lid pressed down but warped a little so that it would not lock. And in the corner three pairs of heavy, discarded boots, gathering dust. That was all. And he _was_ happy; naturally, sanely, unaffectedly happy. There was no room for doubt about that. “Honesty,” Mr. Ewing called it. He used that word over and over again in relation to Corey’s psychology at that time. “And there wasn’t,” he said, “a hypocritical bone in Jim Corey’s body.” One could see what he meant, and see, too, that it had, in his mind, some obscure bearing on what came after. He waited a little here before he went on, as if he were going over to himself incidents too trivial to relate, but which would not separate themselves from his memory of Corey in those days. “Well,” he began, abruptly, rousing himself from his secret contemplation, “there was that winter, nineteen-thirteen, and the next summer, nineteen-fourteen; and then the European war began.” “And he went!” I supplemented, involuntarily, since from the trend of the narrative I had, of course, seen that coming. “No,” said Mr. Ewing in a surprisingly quiet tone of contradiction. “No, he didn’t. I was like you. _I_ thought he’d go.” “You thought he _would_!” I exclaimed, for it seemed to me he had just been trying to make me see how unshakably he had believed Corey to be fixed in Dubuque. “Certainly,” he said. “You’d think it would be only natural he’d want to go. Wouldn’t _you_?” he asked, as if he had detected in my expression some disposition not to agree. “_I_ would,” I said, still wondering at the ease with which he had brushed aside what I had foreseen was to be his climax. For my imagination had long since outrun his story to the end of the usual domestic tragedy, wherein Corey had, at the first call of adventure, forsaken without a word his home and his wife, to find (had not Mr. Ewing told me in the very beginning of his death, three months before, some place in Europe?) his abrupt and unexpected dénouement. There had been, then, something else. “But he did,” I put forth, “finally go? You said, I think, that he died over there?” “Oh yes—finally. But that, you see, wasn’t what counted. It wasn’t the same. It was the way he went.” “The _way_?” I repeated. “Yes. He didn’t go the way, I mean, that I thought he’d go. The way _you_ thought, too.” I said I didn’t understand; that I couldn’t see what difference it made _how_ he went, so long as he did go in the end.