-evening gun and lowered flag--

She lifted colorless face, shaking her head.

"_Katie_!" he cried. "Our life--_our_ love--_our_ life--"

She raised her hand for silence, still shaking her head.

"Won't you--_fight_ for it?" he whispered. "_Try_?"

She kept shaking her head. "Anything else," she managed to articulate.
"Anything else. Not this. You don't understand. Can't. Never would."
Suddenly she cried: "Oh--_go away!_"

For a moment he stood there. But her face was locked against appeal.
Colorless, unsteady, he turned and left her.

Katie put out her hand. Her father--her father in uniform, it had been so
real, it seemed he must be there. But he was not there. Nothing was
there. Nothing at all. As the front door closed she started forward, but
there sounded for her again the notes of the bugle--piercing, compelling,
thing before which all other things must fall away. "Taps," this time, as
blown over her father's grave, soldiers' heads bowed and tears falling
for a fine soldier who would respond to bugle calls no more.

CHAPTER XXXV

Paris was in one of her gray moods that January afternoon. Everything was
gray except the humanity. Emotion never seemed to grow gray in Paris.
From her place by the window in Clara's apartment Katie was looking down
into the narrow street, the people passing to and fro. Two men were
shaking hands. They would stop, then begin again. They had been doing
that for the last five minutes. They seemed to find life a very live
thing. So did the _femme de menage_ and her soldier, who also had been
standing over there for the last five minutes. Katie did not want to look
longer at the _femme de menage_ and her soldier, so she turned her chair
a little about and looked more directly at Clara.

Clara was in gray mood, too. Only Clara differed from the streets in that
it was the emotion was gray; the _robe de chambre_ was red.

So were Clara's eyes. "It's not pleasant, Katie," she was saying, "having
to remain here in Paris for these foggy months--with all one's friends
down on the Riviera."

"No," said Katie grimly, "life's hard."

Clara's tears flowed afresh. "I've often thought _you_ were hard, Katie.
It's because you've never--_cared._ You've never--suffered."

Katie smiled slightly, again looking out the window at the _femme_ and
her soldier, who were as contented with the seclusion offered by a
lamp-post as though it were seclusion indeed. As she watched them, "hard"
did