had shared Bogdan's room with him from the start described the former
awfulness of his face with a sort of pride, as though they had taken
part in the successful operations.

Thus John Bogdan had gradually become almost vain of his shocking
mutilation and the progress of the beautifying process. And when he left
the hospital, it was with the expectation of being admired as a
sensation in his village.

And now?

Alone in the world, with no relatives to go to, with nothing but his
knapsack and his little trunk, the brilliant sunlight of the Hungarian
plain country flooding down on him, and the village stretching away to a
distance before him, John Bogdan suddenly felt himself a prey to
timidity, to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the
shells, the most violent charges, the most ferocious hand-to-hand
encounters. His inert peasant intellect, his nature crudely compounded
of wilfulness and vanity, had always been a stranger to deep-going
reflections. Yet an instinctive misgiving, the sense of distrust and
hostility that overwhelmed him, told him plainly enough that he was
about to face disillusionment and mortification such as he had not
dreamed of in the hospital.

He lifted his luggage to his back dejectedly and walked toward the exit
with hesitating steps. There, in the shadow of the dusty acacias that he
had seen grow up and that had seen him grow up, he felt himself
confronted with his former self, with the handsome John Bogdan who was
known in the village as the smart coachman of the manor. A lot of good
were all the operations and patchwork now. The thing now was the painful