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regan
came home—but it didn’t seem to matter. That was after the mail orderly left a letter beside his hospital cot. It said that Barbara had died in childbirth. After that there was a blank—the world became a sort of vacuum.
It didn’t matter that he’d been a good soldier at the front. It didn’t matter that he’d kept all the youthful idealism that he and Barbara had felt so strongly, that all through the dirt and filth of war he’d carried a picture that was beyond that. It didn’t matter that he’d turned his eyes only to the patient courage of those who fought on without hope of life; that he had lived with the quiet heroism of men who stood with fear on their right hand and death on their left and refused to look at either. All the hundred acts of petty and patient bravery that he
