position; but just one she had found, out in the great world
of souls.

If he had been going to remain at home there might have been a number of
questions, social and conventional, which would have arisen to bar the
way to this free feeling of a friendship, and which she would have had to
meet and reason with before her mind would have shaken itself unhampered;
but because he was going away and on such an errand, perhaps never to
return, the matter of what her friends might think or what the world
would say, simply did not enter into the question at all. The war had
lifted them both above such ephemeral barriers into the place of vision
where a soul was a soul no matter what he possessed or who he was. So, as
she sat in her big white room with all its dainty accessories to a
luxurious life, fit setting for a girl so lovely, she smiled unhindered
at this bit of beautiful friendship that had suddenly drifted down at her
feet out of a great outside unknown world. She touched the letter
thoughtfully with caressing fingers, and the kind of a high look in her
eyes that a lady of old must have worn when she thought of her knight. It
came to her to wonder that she had not felt so about any other of her men
friends who had gone into the service. Why should this special one
soldier boy represent the whole war, as it were, in this way to her.
However, it was but a passing thought, and with a smile still upon her
lips she went to the drawer and brought out the finely knitted garments
she had made, wrapping them up with care and sending them at once upon
their way. It somehow gave her pleasure to set aside a small engagement
she had for that afternoon until she had posted the package herself.

Even then, when she took her belated way to a little gathering in honor
of one of her girl friends who was going to be married the next week to a
young aviator, she kept the smile on her lips and the dreamy look in her
eyes, and now and then brought herself back from the chatter around her
to remember that something pleasant had happened. Not that there was any
foolishness in her thoughts. There was too much dignity and simplicity
about the girl, young as she was, to allow her to deal even with her own
thoughts in any but a maidenly way, and it was not in the ordinary way of
a maid with a man that she thought of this young soldier. He was so far
removed from her life in every way, and all the well-drilled formalities,
that it never occurred t