Mayberry was to meet him later and go to the train with him. But Helen Fuller had come to take him for a spin and for a little talk on this, his last day in town. Somehow, he had not been invited to dinner as she suggested. Was it because Grandon Fuller after all considered the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company of less importance to his schemes, now that he was going away? “Dear _me_, Mr. Barton,” sighed Helen, dexterously turning the car, “my conscience _condemns_ me.” “Why so?” “I fear something I may have said is sending you off like this--so _suddenly_--and to train for the army. Dear me! suppose you should be killed or wounded?” “Scarcely likely in the training camp,” he returned, happy in the concern the girl seemed to show. “Oh, but _afterward_! For I know you will go over there, Mr. Barton. I feel it! And if anything _I_ have said----” “I am sure,” he told her quietly, “that you have said nothing to me or to any of your gentlemen acquaintances regarding our duty in this trying time that was not perfectly justified, Miss Fuller.” “Oh, do you _think_ so?” she cried. “Do you _know_, Mr. Barton, I am greatly tempted to go to France _myself_. Some girls I know have already gone. You know, really, it puts one on the _qui vive_ to hear so much about it--and--and all that,” she added rather vaguely. He was so much in earnest himself, he felt so strongly the exaltation of his decision, that he did not notice the futility of her speech. And then Helen Fuller was strikingly, if a little flamboyantly, pretty. He nodded with pursed lips. “It’s a job we all have to decide for ourselves. I can imagine how you feel, Miss Fuller. As for myself, I’ve got to be in it!” “It’s too bad,” she drawled, “that you couldn’t influence Morry Copley to go with you.” “Well, Mr. Copley now will have to decide for himself, won’t he?” She laughed. “It seems he has allowed Mrs. Copley to decide for him,” she said. Somehow their conversation did not take that personal tinge which Helen desired. To tell the truth, a girl cannot give her escort just the right feeling of intimacy when both her eyes and her hands are engaged in guiding a motor-car. Helen finally dropped Barton at his lodgings in time for dinner, and their good-bye was much more casual than she had intended it should be. “But I shall go over to the camp to see you,” she promised, as she wheeled away from the curb. “Best of luck!” The man stood bareheaded till the girl had turned the corner. But that night when he closed his eyes, in his Pullman berth, it was the face of another girl, with brown eyes tear-filled, that rose to his vision and dissolved only when he sank to sleep. CHAPTER VII LEADING UP TO A CLIMAX