“Do you care whether my wound is troubling me or not?” he asked. “Do you care anything at all about me?”
He seemed suddenly a changed person. The lines which had certainly appeared in his face during the last few days, become more noticeable. He leaned towards her eagerly.
“Miss Conyers,” he went on, “Geraldine, I want you to care--enough for the big things. Don’t interrupt me, please. Listen to what I have to say. Somehow or other, the world has gone amiss with me lately. They won’t have me back, my place has been filled up, I can’t get any fighting. They’ve shelved me at the War Office; they talk about a home adjutancy. I can’t stick it, I have lived amongst the big things too long. I’m sick of waiting about, doing nothing--sick to death. I want to get away. There’s some work I could do in America. You understand?”
“Not in the least,” Geraldine told him frankly.
“It’s my fault,” he declared. “The words all seem to be tumbling out anyhow and I don’t know how to put them in the right order. Can’t you see that I love you, Geraldine? I want you to be my wife, and I want to get right away as quickly as ever I can. Why not America? Why couldn’t we be married this week and get away from everybody?”
She looked at him in sheer amazement, amazement tempered just a little with a sort of tremulous uncertainty.
“But, Captain Granet,” she exclaimed, “you can’t be serious! You couldn’t possibly think of leaving England now.”
“Why not?” he protested. “They won’t let me fight again. I couldn’t stand the miserable routine of home soldiering. I’d like to get away and forget it all.”
“I am sure you are not in earnest,” she said quietly. “No Englishman could feel like that.”
“He could if he cared for you,” Granet insisted. “I’m afraid of everything here, afraid that Thomson will come back and take you away, afraid of all sorts of hideous things happening during the next few months.”
“You mustn’t talk like this, please,” she begged. “You know as well as I do that neither you nor I could turn our backs on England just now and be happy.”
He opened his lips to speak but stopped short. It was obvious that she was deeply in earnest.
“And as for the other thing you spoke of,” she continued, “please won’t you do as I beg you and not refer to it again for the present? Perhaps,” she added, “when the war is over we may speak of it, but just now everything is so confused. I, too, seem to have lost my bearings....You know that I am going out to Boulogne in a few days with Lady Headley’s hospital? Don’t look so frightened. I am not an amateur nurse, I can assure you. I have all my certificates.”