p into his eyes--watching them as they
neared her own--still trying to see them as his lips touched hers.

* * * * *

He was the sort of man who got hungry when left too long unfed. It was
one o'clock. They had gone out to the refrigerator together, his arm
around her supple waist, her charming head against his shoulder--both
hungry but sentimental.

"And don't you really think," she said for the hundredth time, "that
we ought to sell this house?"

"Not a bit of it, darling. We'll run it if we have to live on cereal
and do our own laundry."

"You mean I'll have to do that?"

"I'll help after business hours."

"You wonderful boy!"

There seemed to be some delectable things in the ice chest.

They sat side by side on the kitchen table, blissfully nourishing each
other. Birds do it. Love-smitten youth does it.

"To think," he said, "that you had the nerve to face those beasts and
tell them what you thought of them!"

"Darling!" she remonstrated, placing an olive between his lips.

"You should have the Croix de Guerre," he said indistinctly.

"All I aspire to is a very plain gold ring," she said, smiling at him
sideways.

And she slipped her hand into his.

"_Are_ you going back into the army, Jim?" she asked.

"Who said that?" he demanded.

"I--I heard it repeated."

"Not now," he said. "Unless--" His eyes narrowed and he sat swinging
his legs with an absent air and puckered brows.

And after a while the same aloof look came into her brown eyes, and
she swung her slim feet absently.

Perhaps their remote gaze was fixed on visions of a nearing future,
brilliant with happiness, gay with children's voices; perhaps they saw
farther than that, where the light grew sombre and where a shadowed
sky lowered above a blood-red flood, rising imperceptibly, yet ever
rising--a stealthy, crawling crimson tide spreading westward across
the world.

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