ith her! The night my father's feet were bleeding in the snow,
when they took him! How with me a kid in the crib, my--my brother's face
was crushed in--with a heel and a spur. All night, sometimes, she cries in
her sleep--begging to go back to find the graves. All day she sits making
raffia wreaths to take back--making wreaths--making wreaths!"

"Say, ain't that tough!"

"It's a godsend she's got the eyes to do it. It's wonderful the way she
reads--in English, too. There ain't a daily she misses. Without them and
the wreaths--I dunno--I just dunno. Is--is it any wonder, Milt, I--I can't
see the joke?"

"My God, no!"

"I'll get her back, though."

"Why, you--she can't get back there, Mrs. C."

"There's a way. Nobody can tell me there's not. Before the war--before she
got like this, seven hundred dollars would have done it for both of us--and
it will again, after the war. She's got the bank-book, and every week that
I can squeeze out above expenses, she sees the entry for herself. I'll get
her back. There's a way lying around somewhere. God knows why she should
eat out her heart to go back--but she wants it. God, how she wants it!"

"Poor old dame!"

"You boys guy me with my close-fisted buying these last two years. It's up
to me, Milt, to squeeze this old shebang dry. There's not much more than a
living in it at best, and now, with Selene grown up and naturally wanting
to have it like other girls, it ain't always easy to see my way clear. But
I'll do it, if I got to trust the store for a year to a child like Selene.
I'll get her back."

"You can call on me, Mrs. C., to keep my eye on things while you're gone."

"You boys are one crowd of true blues, all right. There ain't a city
salesman comes out here I wouldn't trust to the limit."

"You just try me out."

"Why, just to show you how a woman don't know how many real friends she has
got, why--even Mark Haas, of the Mound City Silk Company, a firm I don't
do a hundred dollars' worth of business with a year, I wish you could have
heard him the other night at the Y.M.H.A., a man you know for yourself just
goes there to be sociable with the trade."

"Fine fellow, Mark Haas!"

"'When the time comes, Mrs. Coblenz,' he says, 'that you want to make that
trip, just you let me know. Before the war there wasn't a year I didn't
cross the water twice, maybe three times, for the firm. I don't know
there's much I can do; it ain't so easy to arrange for Russia, but, just