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Updated: June 16, 2025
"I know, sir." He was so meek that the Doctor melted. "Run along and say 'Good-bye' to her. I'll give you ten minutes." They wanted ten eternities. But there was, of course, tomorrow. They comforted themselves with that. At dinner, the Doctor spoke of Derry's father. "All real danger is past, but he will have to be careful." "When is Hilda coming back?"
"I have forgotten, which is better, isn't it?" "How sweet you are and all the sweetness is Derry's. Well, when I go over, will you pray for me, my dear?" He was in dead earnest. "There are so few women who pray but I rather fancy that you must " All around them was surging talk. "How strange it seems," Jean said, "that we should be speaking of such things, here "
"Each to his own joys the lobster was very good, Drake." They hardly heard him. Jean had a rosy parfait with a strawberry on top. Derry had another. They talked of the screen play, and the man who had failed. If he had really loved her he would not have failed, Jean said. "I think he loved her," was Derry's opinion; "the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak." Jean shrugged.
And with this bitter but inevitable recognition of the things that are, Amarilly sobbed herself to sleep. The next morning Amarilly served Derry's breakfast in heavy-hearted silence, replying in low-voiced monosyllables to his gay, conversational advances. She performed her household duties about the studio listlessly though with conscientious thoroughness.
The structure of ideals which Derry's mother had so carefully reared for the old house had been wrecked by one who had first climbed the stairs in the garb of a sister of mercy. He saw his father's future. Hilda, cold as ice, setting his authority aside. He saw the big house, the painted lady smiling no more on the stairs.
Poor old soldier, beating time to the triumphant tune, stumbling over the words held pathetically to the memory of those days when he had marched in the glory of his youth, strength and spirit given to a mighty cause! The pity of it wrung Derry's heart. "Couldn't you do anything with him, Bronson?" "No, sir, I tried, but he sent me home. Told me I was discharged."
When they went out, the sleet was coming thick and fast, and Derry's car was waiting. And when they were safe inside, he turned to her and his voice exulted, "I haven't even told you that I love you I haven't asked you to marry me I haven't done any of the conventional things it hasn't needed words, and that's the wonder of it." "Yes." "But you knew." "Yes." "From the first?"
He fancied her as having exquisite sensibility, sweetness, gentleness, perceptions as vivid as her youth and bloom. The front door opened, and Jean and her father came out. Derry's heart leaped as he heard her laugh. Then her clear voice, "Isn't it a wonderful night to walk, Daddy?" and her father's response, "Oh, you with your ecstasies!" They went briskly down the other side of the street.
His patient and heroic end is told by Private Derry, and I imagine that the exhortation to "Stick it, Welsh!" which from time to time he uttered in his agony, will not soon be forgotten in his regiment. Of that end we who mourn him can only say in the simple words of Derry's letter, that he "died as he had lived an officer and a gentleman."
"Lucky girl to be the only one." Derry's manner stiffened. "You are good to think so." After Derry had gone, Hilda said, "You see, it is Jean McKenzie. The Doctor said that he and Jean would be up in Maryland for a day or two. She has a good time. She doesn't know what it means to be poor, not as I know it. She doesn't know what it means to go without the pretty things that women long for.
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