every hour until further orders. ... La grippe principally. He'll be all right."
IX
He lay, for the next few days, dosed with quinine and aconite, his ears ringing, his eyes two balls of pain in his head, his body so sore that he turned himself in bed as carefully as a man just released from the rack. And every aching minute of thought made the situation clearer to him. He had lost her, and he had lost her to Conroy. She had never been more than friendly; the last week had been marked by a growing indifference; she had avoided him, finally, when he went to meet her; and she had received Conroy, had given him her photograph, had allowed him to kiss her, and had turned angrily on him when he came to accuse her of it. How dare he accuse her! What right had he to accuse her! She would never speak to him, she would never see him, again.
The pang of it was not the "pang of disprized love"; he had always known that she did not prize his clumsy devotion. And it was not the sting of wounded vanity—which is so large a portion of a rejected lover's smart—for Don was neither an egotist nor a sentimentalist. It was the pain of a boyish despair, of a lost ideal, of a wrecked hope, of a maimed life. He saw himself living blank days, in aimlessness and regret. He knew that he could never recover from the loss of her; he would bear the scar of it
