“It made _all_ the difference,” said Mr. Ewing. “You see, he didn’t rush off, at the first news of the fighting, the way you’d think a man would. Why, we used to read the papers and talk over the war news together, and every day I’d expect to hear him say something about going. He knew all the places, and the way everything was over there, but he never seemed to care to be there himself. He used to come round to my house just before supper-time in the evenings and we’d sit on the porch and talk, or maybe I’d go round to his porch. I asked him one day if he didn’t want to go, and all he said was, ‘Why should I?’ And I said I didn’t know, it seemed to me that he would. And he said he was comfortable for the first time in his life; he never had liked bumping around in all sorts of places; hated it as a matter of fact. I asked him why, if that was the case, he’d kept it up for so long, all those years; and he laughed, and said _he_ didn’t know; he never _had_ been able to figure that out.” Mr. Ewing fell silent here, tapping his right foot on the carpet a little impatiently and looking speculatively, yet without seeing, at me. I had the impression that he felt he had utterly failed, up to now, in making some subtle point in his story clear, and was considering how best he might make me see. I was sure of it when, after a longish pause, he continued, for he seemed to have decided upon the abandonment of subtleties altogether, and to give me, for my own interpretation, the facts as they occurred. Things had gone on without any change all that winter and the next summer. In August Corey went to some sort of convention of medical men in Philadelphia. He was to have been gone something over two weeks. At the end of that time Mrs. Corey had received a letter saying that some experiments in which he was specially interested had developed rather unexpectedly, and Corey, together with several others, had been detailed to stay on and work them out to their conclusion. He couldn’t say just how many days it would take; he would let her know. At the end of another two weeks Corey was still away. The first phase of the experiments had unhappily come to grief, and they had had to begin from the first again. It was annoying, but since they had gone into it, there was nothing else to be done. He would leave for home on the moment of the work’s completion. Meantime there would be little opportunity for letter-writing. She was not to worry. As the days went on Mrs. Corey began to regret not having gone along in the beginning, as he had wanted her to do. Mr. Ewing stopped in now and then to inquire. Her reticence made him wonder if she might not be hearing. It was plain that she _did_ worry, but, as Mr. Ewing said, she was not the talkative kind.