e of
the evening, after the men had left; then she turned to Marjorie
suddenly, raising her lorgnette.

"Leonard's letters must have been very interesting to your friends in
America."

"Oh, yes," stammered Marjorie; "but he never said very much about the
war." She blushed.

"Ah," said the older woman; "I observed he was very silent on the
subject. It's a code or custom among his set in the army, you may be
sure of that. So many young officers' letters have been published," she
continued, turning to Mrs. Leeds. "Lady Alice Fryzel was telling me the
other day that she was putting all her son's letters into book form."

Marjorie had an inward vision of Leonard's letters published in book
form! She knew them by heart, written from the trenches in pencil on
lined paper--"servant paper," Leonard called it. They came in open
envelopes unstamped, except with the grim password "war zone." Long,
tired letters; short, tired letters, corrected by the censor's red ink,
and full of only "our own business," as Leonard said. Sometimes at the
end there would be a postscript hastily inserted: "I was in my first
real battle to-day. Can't say I enjoyed it." Or, "Ronald Lambert, who
was my chum at Eton, never turned up to-night. I feel pretty sick about
it." She remembered the postscript of his first letter from the front;
not a word about the thunder of the distant cannonading or the long line
of returning ambulances that greeted the incoming soldier. It gave the
first realistic smack of the filthy business of war. "I've had my head
shaved," Leonard wrote. "P.P.S. Caught One." Marjorie wondered how that
would look to Aunt Hortense, published in book form.

"Aren't the men a long while?" said Mrs. Leeds, for the fifth time; and
Marjorie could endure it no longer. She could not bear to sit there and
look at Mrs. Leeds's face. The fierce resignation of the mother's eyes
seemed dumbly to accuse Marjorie, whose whole youth and passionate being
protested: "I won't let her have Leonard this evening--I won't--I
can't--it's his last! Why don't old people, like Aunt Hortense, fight
wars, if they're so crazy about it?"

She crept unnoticed to the dark alcove, and slipped through the curtains
of the French window. But the older woman's shrewd glance followed her;
and all the while she was listening with apparent composure and concern
to Hortense, she was saying to herself, with bitter impatience,--

"Fool! Why did she have to come this evening