Their bodies were here, but their hearts and minds were always far away in their dear fatherland, of which--brave men and stoical as they were in many ways--they would speak with tears in their eyes.

One of the worst of the sufferers from this home-woe, as he called it in his own tongue, was Matthaus Tina, whose dreamy musing nature felt the gloom of exile still more intensely from the fact that he had left a lonely mother at home with nobody to cheer her.
Though Phyllis, touched by all this, and interested in his history, did not disdain her soldier's acquaintance, she declined (according to her own account, at least) to permit the young man to overstep the line of mere friendship for a long while--as long, indeed, as she considered herself likely to become the possession of another; though it is probable that she had lost her heart to Matthaus before she was herself aware.

The stone wall of necessity made anything like intimacy difficult; and he had never ventured to come, or to ask to come, inside the garden, so that all their conversation had been overtly conducted across this boundary..