It was funny, Dick told himself after it was over, the formal good behavior of the two, the conscious restraint that said louder than words throughout dinner, "I shall not be the one to offend." Patsy skated away from the war in haste whenever there was even a possibility of its getting into the conversation. She invented an interest in the condition of the girls at the munition plant, and she was gentleness itself in her questions and answers to Ralph. The girl was really touched by the change in the looks and the manner of the young man. He was paler than she had ever seen him. It was not unbecoming to the big fellow, but it was a little pathetic--to Patsy. He was quieter, less talkative, not at all assertive. "Something has gone out of him," Patsy told herself. What was it? And it was not strange at all that she should have said to herself, "There's been a girl somewhere, and he's lost her." She wondered if it could be that the girl had like herself believed in Belgium and France. Perhaps she was a nurse and had insisted on going, and Ralph had broken with her. He'd do that, she thought to herself, with a stiffening spine which she immediately limbered, when she caught his eyes on her. As for Ralph, he had come prepared to be very, very polite to Patsy. He would not force her attention, he would talk only about the things he knew she was interested in and he would agree with her if it choked him. But somehow he found himself talking quite freely of things he was interested in and which Patsy herself had led him to. He talked well and reasonably of the munition plants, and he didn't take a single fling at "welfare work." He was amazed how all these things seemed to have fallen into relation to other things, or, rather, how there seemed to be other things as well. And Patsy's eyes--he softened and trembled under them. They were so gentle and half-pitying. What in the world could it mean? He knew well enough that back in that active little brain something was revolving--something about him. But never in his life would he have figured out that Patsy, as she sat quietly discussing Sabinsport factories, was building a romance of which he was the broken-hearted villain and a fair-haired nurse in France the broken-hearted heroine.