"It's like the war," she told them. "Why worry? If you're dead, you're dead and won't know about it. If you're not dead—or however the thing goes. We ought to send her some clothes," she added practically.
Some time after midnight Henry went up to bed. Bessie could follow his thoughts as he went, his heavy shoulders bent, the yellow corner of Kay's telegram sticking out of the pocket of his dinner jacket. He had been a good husband and father; he had been upright in business according to his lights, and he had asked very little of life in his declining years; peace and a few friends, the love of his family and the respect of his community. Now they were all gone. Wiped out. She heard him stop at the room where the wedding gifts like small glittering corpses of dead hopes were laid out on their biers, close the door and go on.
Something of all this was running through Herbert's mind as he waited in the anteroom of the hospital, but only as a background to other and bitterer thoughts. If they centered gn himself rather than on Kay, perhaps it was only natural. He had loved her sincerely. There had never been anyone else. He had built all his future about her. He had not even played around like other fellows; not since college anyhow. Now she had destroyed everything. Not everything exactly; he was precise even with himself. Henry had said that the business proposition still stood. But she had hurt him and made him a laughing-stock; she had jilted him at the last moment, an injury and an insult whose stigma would follow him always. He ought to hate her. But he could not hate her. If he did, why was he here? If he could hate her it would be easier.
His thoughts wandered on, to the receipt of Kay's second telegram that morning, that Tom McNair had been shot; to the long journey, sitting in a chair in a parlor car and watching a landscape fly by which had made no impression on his mental retina. Only one thing had registered, and that with a shock he could still feel and suffer from. By a sidetrack just outside of town his train had slowed up, and there beside him, close to him, was the long line of yellow show cars.
