ephone, but when at last he
got the connection it was to learn that no further details were known.
Toward dawn there came the official telegram from the War Department,
but it told nothing more.

Natalie was hysterical. He had sent for a doctor, and with Madeleine
in attendance the medical man had worked over her for hours. Going out,
toward morning, he had found Clayton in the hall and had looked at him
sharply.

"Better go to bed, Mr. Spencer," he advised. "It may not be as bad as
you think. And they're doing fine surgery over there."

And, as Clayton shook his head:

"Mrs. Spencer will come round all right. She's hysterical, naturally.
She'll be sending for you before long."

With the dawn, Clayton's thoughts cleared. If he and Natalie were ever
to get together at all, it should be now, with this common grief between
them. Perhaps, after all, it was not too late to re-build his house
of life. He had failed. Perhaps they had both failed, but the real
responsibility was his. Inside the room he could hear her moaning, a
low, monotonous, heart-breaking moan. He was terribly sorry for her. She
had no exaltation to help her, no strength of soul, no strength of any
sort. And, as men will under stress, he tried to make a bargain with his
God.

"Let him live," he prayed. "Bring him back to us, and I will try again.
I'll do better. I've been a rotten failure, as far as she is concerned.
But I'll try."

He felt somewhat better after that, altho he felt a certain ignominy,
too, that always, until such a time, he had gone on his own, as it were,
and that now, when he no longer sufficed for himself, he should beseech
the Almighty.

Natalie had had a sleeping-powder, and at last he heard her moaning
cease and the stealthy movements of her maid as she lowered the window
shades. It was dawn.

During the next two days Clayton worked as he never had worked before,
still perhaps with that unspoken pact in mind. Worked too, to forget. He
had sent several cables, but no reply came until the third day. He did
not sleep at night. He did not even go to bed. He sat in the low chair
in his dressing-room, dozing occasionally, to waken with a start at some
sound in the hall. Now and again, as the trained nurse who was watching
Natalie at night moved about the hallways, he would sit up, expecting a
summons that did not come.

She still refused to see him. It depressed and frightened him, for how
could he fulfill his part of the comp