After the time he had asked Jean to take away Harvey's photograph he did
not recur to the subject, but he did not need to. Jean knew, perhaps
even better than Henri himself, that the boy was recklessly, hopelessly,
not quite rationally in love with the American girl.

Also Henri was fretting about his work. Sometimes at night, following
Henri's instructions, Jean wandered quietly along roads and paths that
paralleled the Front. At such times his eyes were turned, not toward
the trenches, but toward that flat country which lay behind, still dotted
at that time with groves of trees, with canals overhung with pollard
willows, and with here and there a farmhouse that at night took on in
the starlight the appearance of being whole again.

Singularly white and peaceful were those small steadings of Belgium
in the night hours--until cruel dawn showed them for what they
were--skeletons of dead homes, clothed only at night with wraithlike
roofs and chimneys; ghosts of houses, appearing between midnight and
cock crow.

Jean had not Henri's eyes nor his recklessness nor his speed, for that
matter. Now and then he saw the small appearing and disappearing lights
on some small rise. He would reach the spot, with such shelter as
possible, to find only a sugar-beet field, neglected and unplowed.

Then, one night, tragedy came to the little house of mercy.

XX

Harvey proceeded to put his plan into effect at once, with the simple
method of an essentially simple nature. The thing had become
intolerable; therefore it must end.

On the afternoon following his talk with Belle he came home at three
o'clock. Belle heard him moving about in his room, and when she entered
it, after he had gone, she found that he had shaved and put on his best
suit.

She smiled a little. It was like Harvey to be literal. He had said he
was going to go round and have a good time, and he was losing no time.
But in their restricted social life, where most of the men worked until
five o'clock or even later, there were fewer afternoon calls paid.
Belle wondered with mild sisterly curiosity into what arena Harvey was
about to fling his best hat.

But though Harvey paid a call that afternoon it was not on any of the
young women he knew. He went to see Mrs. Gregory. She was at home--he
had arranged for that by telephone--and the one butler of the
neighborhood admitted him. It was a truculent young man, for all his
politeness, who confronted Mrs. Gre