EVELYN LIFTS A CORNER OF THE CURTAIN

DURING the return ride, Kilgariff carefully avoided all reference to the real purpose of his visit to Wyanoke. He had come to dread that subject, and in his present unsettled state of mind he feared it also. It might at any moment bring on an emotional crisis, and prompt him to do or say things that must afterward cause regret. He wished to think the matter out—the matter of his future relations with this girl—and to determine finally the course of conduct which this morning’s discovery might require of him.

He ought to have seized upon the opportunity for this that he had so recklessly thrown away. He ought to have let Evelyn go to the invalid camp alone, he remaining behind to think. But he had missed that opportunity, and no other was likely to come to him. Certainly no other so good could come. He must get through the matter of the papers on this day, not only because the chances of war might compel him to return to his post on the morrow, but because he might very probably decide that it was his duty to take himself out of this girl’s life, and, if that was to be, the sooner he should quit the house that held her the better.

Both Arthur and Dorothy were present to welcome him when he and Evelyn returned to the house, so that there was no chance then to do his thinking. Then Arthur decided to examine his wound before the breakfast hour; and when he did so, he grew grave of face and manner.

“I’m sorry to tell you, old fellow, that I must operate on your neck to-day. Your wound is in a very dangerous condition indeed. It should have been operated upon a week or ten days ago. You shall have breakfast with us this morning, as you’ll need all your strength. Of course I can’t chloroform you till your breakfast is digested, so I’ll not operate till a little after noonday.”

“You needn’t give me the chloroform at all,” answered Kilgariff.

“But, my dear fellow, the pain will be—”

“I’ll stand it.”

“But the operation will be a very delicate one, so near to the carotid artery that a mere flinch from the knife might end your life at once.”

“I’ll not flinch,” said the resolute young man.

“But what objection have you to an anÆsthetic? Your heart and lungs are in perfect condition. There’s not the slightest danger—”

“Danger be hanged!” interrupted Kilgariff. “I am not thinking of danger or caring about it. But chloroform always leaves me helplessly ill for many days, and I mustn’t be ill or helpless just now. I am going back to the lines to-morrow. One night’s sleep after your operation will put me sufficiently in condition.”

“But you’re not fit for duty.”

“Fit or not fit, I am going.”

“But it will kill you.”

“That doesn’t signify in my case, you know.”

“Listen to me, Owen Kilgariff. You have brooded over the unfortunate circumstances of your life until you have grown morbid, particularly since this wound has been sapping your vitality. You must brace yourself up and take a healthier view of things. If you don’t, I shall make you. Here you are imagining yourself disgraced at the very time when others in high places are pressing honours upon you as the well-earned reward of your superb conduct. It is all nonsense, I tell you, and you must quit it; if not for your own sake, then for the sake of us who love you and rejoice in your splendid manhood. Your present attitude of mind is not to your credit. If you were not ill, it would be positively discreditable to you.”

“Wait a minute, Arthur. You are judging me without knowing all the facts. I’ll tell you of them after breakfast. Then, before you operate, I must talk with Evelyn about her papers. When that matter is disposed of, you shall operate without an anÆthetic, and I must return to my duty on the lines.”

“Your duty there is done. You’ve already taught those fellows how to use mortars effectively. As to mere command, any other officer will attend to that as well as you could. I must operate upon your neck, and I will not do it without chloroform. Indeed, even from your own point of view, there would be nothing gained by that, for after this operation, whether done with or without an anÆsthetic, you must not only lie abed for some days to come, but be so braced and harnessed that you cannot turn your head.”

Arthur then explained to his patient, as one surgeon to another, the exact nature of what it was necessary to do, and Kilgariff knew his surgery too well not to understand how imperatively necessary it would be for him to be kept perfectly still, so far as motion with his head was concerned, for a considerable period afterward.

“Very well,” Kilgariff responded. “Do as you will. But first I must arrange the matter of the papers. I’ll do that during the forenoon. Then I shall tell Dorothy the things I intended to tell you. There is no need that I shall tell you, and it will be easier to tell Dorothy.”

“As you please,” said Arthur, satisfied that he had carried his point. “Now we must go to breakfast.”

At the table, Kilgariff observed that, apart from the “coffee” made of parched rye, neither Dorothy nor Evelyn took anything but fruit. There was a cold ham on the table, and the customary loaf of hot bread, but the two women partook of neither. When Kilgariff half suggested, half asked, the reason for their abstemiousness, Dorothy replied:—

“We Virginia women are saving for the army every ounce of food we can. So far as possible, we eat nothing that can be converted into rations. Arthur compels Evelyn and me to take a little meat and a little bread or some potatoes for dinner. He thinks that necessary to our health. But for the rest, we do very well on fruits, vegetables, and other perishable things, don’t we, Byrdie?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. For my own part, I like it. I have had other experiences in living on a restricted diet. Once I had nothing to eat for three or four months except meat, so in going without meat now I am only bringing up the average.”

Kilgariff looked up in surprise.

“For three months or more you had no food but meat!” he exclaimed. “No bread, no starchy food of any kind?”

“Nothing whatever. There weren’t even roots or grass there to be chewed. The Indians often live in that way. Never mind that. At another time I lived for a month in winter almost exclusively on raw potatoes, with only now and then a bit of salt beef.”

“May I ask why you did not cook the potatoes? If it was winter, surely you had fire.”

“Oh, yes, plenty of it. But there was scurvy, and raw potatoes are best for that.”

“Are they? I never knew that.”

“Oh, yes. But for eating their potatoes raw, the people in the lumber-camps would never survive the winter. But I don’t want to talk about those things. I didn’t mean to. Perhaps I’ll put them all into another book that I’m writing just for Dorothy to read and nobody else in all the world.”

She looked at Dorothy as she spoke, and Dorothy understood. This was the first she had heard of the proposed “book.” It was the first reference Evelyn had made to their talk on the day when she had given her hostess an exhibition of bareback riding.

Kilgariff did not understand. Yet, taken in connection with other things that Evelyn had said to him during his former stay at Wyanoke, what she now said seemed at least to lift a little corner of the thick curtain of reserve which shrouded her life-history.

“She has lived,” he thought, “among the wildest of wild Indians, and she has passed at least one winter in some northern lumber-camp. I wonder why.”

He was not destined as yet to get any reply to the question in his mind.