them. Women held them
back from wandering. That was how they were tricked into the deadly home
feeling his father warned him of.

"Funny, funny, funny!" he said again.

From an inner pocket he drew a sheet of note paper worn almost through
at the fold, stained with the ooze of trenches and his own sweat. It had
come deviously to him in the front line a month after his meeting with
Patricia Whipple. In that time the strange verse had still run in his
mind--a crown of stars, and under her feet the moon! The tumult of
fighting had seemed to fix it there. He had rested on the memory of her
and become fearless of death. But the time had changed so tremendously.
He could hardly recall the verse, hardly recall that he had faced death
or the strange girl.

"Wilbur, dear," he read, "I am still holding you. Are you me? What do
you guess? Do you guess we were a couple of homesick ninnies, tired and
weak and too combustible? Or do you guess it meant something about us
finding each other out all in one second, like a flash of something? Do
you guess we were frazzled up to the limit and not braced to hold back
or anything, the way civilized people do? I mean, will we be the same
back home? If we will be, how funny! We shall have to find out, shan't
we? But let's be sporty, and give the thing a chance to be true if it
can. That's fair enough, isn't it? What I mean, let's not shatter its
morale by some poky chance meeting with a lot of people round, whom it
is none of their business what you and I do or don't do. That would be
fierce, would it not? So much might depend.

"Anyway, here's what: The first night I am home--your intelligence
department must find out the day, because I'm not going to write to you
again if I never see you, I feel so unmaidenly--I shall be at our stile
leading out to West Hill. You remember it--above the place where those
splendid gypsies camped when we were such a funny little boy and girl.
The first night as soon as I can sneak out from my proud family. You
come there. We'll know!"

* * * * *

"Funny, funny, funny--the whole game!" he said.

He lost himself in a lazy wonder if it could be true. He didn't know.
Once she had persisted terribly in his eyes; now she had faded. Her
figure before the broken church was blurred.

Sharon Whipple found him the next afternoon teaching two new men the use
and abuse of a tractor, and plainly bored by his task. Sharon seized the
mo