id something to everybody. In less than a week the world was aware
that Robert Lorillard, its lost idol, was coming back to life; that he
who had been for a few months the husband of wonderful June Dana--the
Duchess of Stane's daughter--was engaged to a "V.-A.-D. girl who'd
nursed him in the war, and had been his secretary or something."

But, after all, the talk mattered very little to those most concerned.
They were divinely happy, the two who were talked about, though they
would have liked to be let alone. I suppose, for Robert, it was a
different kind of happiness from that which the condescension of his
goddess had given him: less dazzling perhaps; more like the warm
sweetness of early spring and its flowers, compared with a tropical
summer of scented magnolias and daturas. June had been a goddess
stepping down from her golden pedestal, and Joyce was a loving, adoring
human girl, ready for all that wifehood might mean.

Robert shut up the little place by the river (where they planned to live
later), and stopped at an hotel in town, though he had never let the
flat in St. James's Square, the scene of his engagement to June.

I began helping Joyce choose a trousseau that could be got together in
haste, for they were to go to the south of France and Italy for their
honeymoon; and one day, after shopping the whole morning and part of the
afternoon, we were to meet Robert for tea at the Savoy.

You know that soft amber light there is in the big _foyer_ of the Savoy
at tea-time, like the beautiful subdued light in dreams? Since the war
it brings back to me ghosts of all the jolly, handsome boys one used to
see there, whose bodies sleep now under the poppies and _bluets_ of
France; and as Joyce and I walked in, rather late, the thought of those
boys and those days came over me with the sobbing music of the violins.

"It's like the beat, beat of invisible hearts," I said to myself. And
suddenly I was sad.

There sat Robert, waiting for us. He had taken a table for three, and
one of the chairs, I noticed, was a noble one covered with velvet
brocade--a chair like a Queen's throne.

He rose at sight of us, and I saw that a little woman at a table close
by was looking at him with intense interest. In fact, her interest in
Robert gave her a kind of fictitious interest of her own, in my eyes,
she seemed so absorbed in him.

She was one of those women you'd know to be American if you met them
crawling up the North Pole; a