It was on Doggie's agitated lips to shout a true "I didn't!" For that was the devil of it. Had he been so wounded, he could have purred contentedly while accepting the genuine hero's meed of homage and consolation. But he had left his country's service to enter that of Jeanne. In her service he had been shot through the leg. He had no business to be wounded at all. Jeanne saw that very clearly. To have exposed himself to the risk of his exploit was contrary to all his country's interests. His wound had robbed her of a fighting man, not a particularly valuable warrior, but a soldier in the firing line all the same. If every man went off like that on private missions of his own and got properly potted, there would be the end of the Army. It was horrible to be an interesting hero under false pretences. Of course he might have been George Washingtonian enough to shout: "I cannot tell a lie. I didn't." But that would have meant relating the whole story of Jeanne. And would Peggy have understood the story of Jeanne? Could Peggy, in her plain-sailing, breezy British way, have appreciated all the subtleties of his relations with Jeanne? She would ask pointed, probably barbed, questions about Jeanne. She would tear the whole romance to shreds. Jeanne stood too exquisite a symbol for him to permit the sacrilege of Peggy's ruthless vivisection. For vivisect she would, without shadow of doubt. His long and innocent familiarity with womankind in Durdlebury had led him instinctively to the conclusion formulated by one of the world's greatest cynics in his advice to a young man: "If you care for happiness, never speak to a woman about another woman." Doggie felt uncomfortable as he looked into Peggy's clear blue eyes; not conscience-stricken at the realization of himself as a scoundrelly Don Juan--that never entered his ingenuous mind; but he hated his enforced departure from veracity. The one virtue that had dragged the toy Pom successfully along the Rough Road of the soldier's life was his uncompromising attitude to Truth. It cost him a sharp struggle with his soul to reply to Peggy: "All right. Have it so if it pleases you, my dear. But it was an idiot fluke all the same." "I wonder if you know how you've changed," she said, after a while. "For better or worse?" "The obvious thing to say would be 'for the better.' But I wonder. Do you mind if I'm frank?" "Not a bit." "There's something hard about you, Marmaduke." Doggie wrinkled lips and brow in a curious smile. "I'll be frank too. You see, I've been living among men, instead of a pack of old women." "I suppose that's it," Peggy said thoughtfully. "It's a dud sort of place, Durdlebury," said he. "Dud?" He laughed. "It never goes off." "You used to say, in your letters, that you longed for it." "Perhaps I do now--in a way. I don't know." "I bet you'll settle down there after the war, just as though nothing had happened." "I wonder," said Doggie.