Her face was quivering.  “Katie,” it made him ask, “don’t you think you’d better—­quit?”

She turned wet eyes upon him reproachfully.  “From you?”

“But is any—­individual—­worth it?”

“Oh I suppose no ‘individual’ is worth much to you,” she said a little bitterly.

There was a touch of irony in the tender smile which was his only response.

They stood there in silence watching men and women come and go—­solitary and in groups—­groups tired and groups laughing—­groups respectable and groups questionable—­humanity—­worn humanity—­as it crossed that bridge.

She recalled that first night she had talked with him—­that first time a hot day had seemed to her anything more than mere hot day, that night on the Mississippi—­where distant hills were to be seen.  She remembered how she had looked around the world that night to see if it needed “saving.”  It seemed a long time ago since she had not been able to see that the world needed saving.

That was the night the man who mended the boats told her she had walked sunny paths.  She looked up at him with a faint smile, smiling at the fancy of his being an outsider.

It seemed, on the other hand, that all the hopes and fears in all the hearts that were passing them were drawing them together.  There had been times when she had had a wonderful sense of their silences holding the sum of man’s experiences.

“You must go home,” he was saying decisively.

“Home?  Where?  To my uncle’s?  That’s where I keep the trunks I’m not using.”

She laughed and brushed away a tear.  “You know in the army we don’t have homes.”

“Well you have temporary homes,” he insisted, as each moment she seemed to become more worn.  “You know what I mean.  Go back to your brother’s.”

“He’ll be ordered from there very soon.  There’ll not be a place there for me much longer.”

He did not seem to have reckoned with that.  His face changed.  “Then where will you go, Katie?” he asked, very low.  “What will you do?”

She shook her head.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know where I’ll go—­and I don’t know what I’ll do.”

They stood there in silence, drawn close by thought of separation.

“Shall we walk on?” she said at last.  “I’ve lost the feeling that we’re going to find Ann to-night.”

And so, still silently, they walked on.

But when, after a moment, he looked at her, it was to see that she was making heroic effort to control the tears.  “Katie!” he murmured, “what is it?”

“We’re giving up,” she said, and could not say more.

“Why no we’re not!  It’s only the method we’re giving up.  This way of doing it.  You’ve tried this long enough.”

“But what else is there?  Just looking.  Just keeping on looking—­and hoping.  Just the chance.  What other method is there?”

“We’ll find some other,” he insisted, not willing, when she looked like that, to speak his fears.  “There’ll be some other way.  But you can’t keep on this way—­dear.”