ion for her husband and her curious antipathy to soldiering
as a profession, had not dared to anticipate. There was something rather
splendid about her quiet acceptance of it. It was Elisabeth at her
best--humanly hurt and broken, but almost heroic in her endurance now
that the blow had actually fallen. And Sara prayed that no further
sacrifice might be demanded from her--prayed that Tim might come through
safely. For herself, she mourned Geoffrey Durward as one good comrade
does another. She knew that his death would leave a big gap in the ranks
of those she counted friends.

It had been a wonderful year--that year which she had passed in
France--wonderful in its histories of tragedy and self-sacrifice, and
in its revelation both of the brutality and of the infinite fineness of
humanity. Few could have passed through such an experience and remained
unchanged, certainly no one as acutely sentient and receptive as Sara.

She felt as though she had been pitchforked into a vast melting-pot,
where the cast-iron generalizations and traditions which most people
consider their opinions grew flexible and fluid in the scorching heat
of the furnace, assimilating so much of the other ingredients in the
cauldron that they could never reassume their former unqualified and
rigid state.

And now that year of crowded life and ardent service was over, and she
was side-tracked by medical orders for an indefinite period.

"Go back to England," her doctor had told her, "to the quietest corner
in the country you can find--and try to forget that there _is_ a war!"

This thin, eager-faced young woman, of whom every one on the hospital
staff spoke in such glowing terms, interested him enormously. He could
see that her year's work had taken out of her about double what it would
have taken out of any one less sensitively alive, and he made a shrewd
guess that something over and above the mere hard work accounted for
that curiously fine-drawn look which he had observed in her.

During a hastily snatched meal, before the advent of another batch of
casualties, he had sounded Lady Arronby on the subject. The latter shook
her head.

"I can tell you very little. I believe there was a bad love-affair
just before the war. All I know is that she was engaged and that the
engagement was broken off very suddenly."

"Humph! And she's been living on her reserves ever since. Pack her off
to England--and do it quick."

So October found Sara back in En