crocks?" countered Miles bitterly.

She smiled at him suddenly.

"Yes--for the crocks, too."

He shook his head.

"No, Audrey, I'm an utterly useless person--a cumberer of the ground."

"Not in my eyes, Miles," she answered quietly.

He met her glance, and read, at last, what--as she told him later--he
might have read there any time during the last six months, had he chosen
to look for it.

"Do you mean that, Audrey?" he asked, suddenly gripping her hands hard.
"All of it--all that it implies?"

She slipped to her knees beside his couch.

"Oh, my dear!" she said, between laughing and crying. "I've been meaning
it--'all of it'--for ever so long. Only--only you won't ask me to marry
you!"

"How can I? A lame man, and not even a rich one?"

"I believe," said Audrey composedly, "we've argued both those points
before--from a strictly impersonal point of view! Couldn't you--couldn't
you get over your objection to coming to live with me at Greenacres,
dear?"

Audrey always declared, afterwards, that it had required the most
blatant encouragement on her part to induce Miles to propose to her, and
that, but for the war--which convinced him that he was of no use to any
one else--he never would have done so.

Presumably she was able to supply the requisite stimulus, for when the
Lavender Lady joined them later on in the afternoon, she found herself
called upon to perform that function of sheer delight to every old maid
of the right sort--namely, to bestow her blessing on a pair of newly
betrothed lovers.

Sara received the news the next morning, and though naturally, by
contrast, it seemed to add a keener edge to her own grief, she was still
able to rejoice whole-heartedly over this little harvesting of joy which
her two friends had snatched from amid the world's dreadful harvesting
of pain and sorrow.

By the same post as the radiant letters from Miles and Audrey came one
from Elisabeth Durward. She wrote distractedly.

"Tim is determined to volunteer," ran her letter. "I can't let him go,
Sara. He is my only son, and I don't see why he should be claimed from
me by this horrible war. I have persuaded him to wait until he has seen
you. That is all he will consent to. So will you come and do what you
can to dissuade him? There is a cord by which you could hold him if you
would."

A transient smile crossed Sara's face as she pictured Tim gravely
consenting to await her opinion on the matter. He knew--none
bet