He thought, of course, of Harry Chalender. Harry Chalender!—Harry Chalender, who had never repented a crime, never reformed, never spared a home or a virtue or failed to abet a weakness. Yet he was hale and smirking still at life, an heroic rake still fluttering the young girls’ hearts, garnering the praises of men. If God were punishing sin, how could he pass Harry Chalender by, and let him live untouched? But Patty’s head swung back and forth: “God can never forgive me, I suppose. But you do—don’t you, honey?—you forgive me?” “I have nothing to forgive you for. You have been my angel always. I adore you.” She clenched his hand with gratitude and then she wrung it as a throe wrung her. It was RoBards that cried, screamed: “Oh, I don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I can’t stand it!” He was in such frenzy of sympathy that she put out her pale, twitching hand and caressed his bowed head, and felt sorry for his sorrow. But night and day, day and night! She groaned: “The worst of it is, honey, that there’s no end of it till there’s an end of me. If I could only die soon! That’s the only remedy, dear heart. I pray for death, but it won’t come. I used to be so afraid of it, and now I love it—next to you.” Again and again the surgeons took her away, and brought her back lessened. Sometimes she pleaded with RoBards against a return to that table, clinging with her flaccid little fingers to his sleeve, imploring him not to let them hurt her, if he loved her. And his love of her made him drive her back. She sighed again and again in a kind of aloofness from herself: “Oh, my pretty body, my poor little, pretty, pretty body, how sorry I am for you!” And once, as they carried her along the corridor she whispered to her husband: “I always wanted to be good, honey. And I tried to. I always wanted to be all that you wanted me to be; and you always wanted me to be everything that was—wonderful. But somehow I couldn’t be—wonderful. You forgive me, though, don’t you? I always loved you. Sometimes it must have seemed as if I cared more for somebody else. But that was just weakness—restlessness—something like a fever or a chill that I couldn’t help. But all the time I loved you. And you have loved me gloriously. That is all the pride my poor body and I have left—that we were loved by so good a man as you.” She suffered most perhaps because of the flight of her beauty before the ravages of her enemy. But underneath the mask of her pain, RoBards could always see the pretty thing she was when she was a bride asleep against his shoulder on the long drive up to Tuliptree Farm. And when at last they let her go back there to escape the noise of the city, he rode beside her again behind slow-trotting horses. But now they were in an ambulance lent them by one of the military hospitals.