Carley tried to picture to herself Glenn's attitude of mind when he had first gone to work here in the West.Resolutely she now denied her shrinking, cowardly sensitiveness.She would go to the root of this matter, if she had intelligence enough.Crippled, ruined in health, wrecked and broken by an inexplicable war, soul-blighted by the heartless, callous neglect of government and public, on the verge of madness at the insupportable facts, he had yet been wonderful enough, true enough to himself and God, to fight for life with the instinct of a man, to fight for his mind with a noble and unquenchable faith.Alone indeed he had been alone!
And by some miracle beyond the power of understanding he had found day by day in his painful efforts some hope and strength to go on.He could not have had any illusions.For Glenn Kilbourne the health and happiness and success most men held so dear must have seemed impossible.His slow, daily, tragic, and terrible task must have been something he owed himself.Not for Carley Burch! She like all the others had failed him.How Carley shuddered in confession of that! Not for the country which had used him and cast him off! Carley divined now, as if by a flash of lightning, the meaning of Glenn's strange, cold, scornful, and aloof manner when he had encountered young men of his station, as capable and as strong as he, who had escaped the service of the army.For him these men did not exist.They were less than nothing.They had waxed fat on lucrative jobs; they had basked in the presence of girls whose brothers and lovers were in the trenches or on the turbulent sea, exposed to the ceaseless dread and almost ceaseless toil of war.If Glenn's spirit had lifted him to endurance of war for the sake of others, how then could it fail him in a precious duty of fidelity to himself? Carley could see him day by day toiling in his lonely canyon--plodding to his lonely cabin.He had been playing the game--fighting it out alone as surely he knew his brothers of like misfortune were fighting.
So Glenn Kilbourne loomed heroically in Carley's transfigured sight.He was one of Carley's battle-scarred warriors.Out of his travail he had climbed on stepping-stones of his dead self.Resurqam! That had been his unquenchable cry.Who had heard it? Only the solitude of his lonely canyon, only the waiting, dreaming, watching walls, only the silent midnight shadows, only the white, blinking, passionless stars, only the wild creatures of his haunts, only the moaning wind in the pines--only these had been with him in his agony.How near were these things to God?
Carley's heart seemed full to bursting.Not another single moment could her mounting love abide in a heart that held a double purpose.How bitter the assurance that she had not come West to help him! It was self, self, all self that had actuated her.Unworthy indeed was she of the love of this man.Only a lifetime of devotion to him could acquit her in the eyes of her better self.Sweetly and madly raced the thrill and tumult of her blood.
There must be only one outcome to her romance.Yet the next instant there came a dull throbbing-an oppression which was pain--an impondering vague thought of catastrophe.Only the fearfulness of love perhaps!
She saw him complete his task and wipe his brown moist face and stride toward her, coming nearer, tall and erect with something added to his soldierly bearing, with a light in his eyes she could no longer bear.
The moment for which she had waited more than two months had come at last.
"Glenn--when will you go back East?" she asked, tensely and low.