ed the door.

"Mademoiselle," he said gravely, "once before, long ago, you permitted
me to kiss you. Will you do that for me again?"

She kissed him at once gravely. Once she would have flushed. She did
not now. For there was a change in Sara Lee as well as in her outlook.
She had been seeing for months the shortness of life, the brief tenure
men held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hours
that remained. She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and her
charm of youth. Values had changed. To love, and to show that love, to
cheer, to comfort and help--that was necessary, because soon the chance
might be gone, and there would be long aching years of regret.

So she kissed him gravely and looked up into his eyes, her own full of
tears.

"God bless and keep you, dear Henri," she said.

Then she went back to her work.

XXII

Much of Sara Lee's life at home had faded. She seemed to be two people.
One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it
away from Uncle James' kind but curious eyes. And one was this present
Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer
horribly, not to gain anything--except perhaps some honorable
advancement for their souls--but that there might be preserved, at any
cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to
pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God.

She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future. So she
was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers
and at last its sleep. Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter.
She reread his letters often, but they were forced. And after a time
she realized another quality in them. They were self-centered. It was
_his_ anxiety, _his_ loneliness, _his_ humiliation. Sara Lee's eyes were
looking out, those days, over a suffering world. Harvey's eyes were
turned in on himself.

She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself. What
she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come
sometime--that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that
day, that he would say things that he would regret later. Sometimes the
thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her
hands would tremble.

Henri had not returned when, the second day after Rene's death, the
letter came which recalled her. She opened it eagerly. Though from
Harvey there usually