All that afternoon, much to Harvey’s resentment, Sara Lee received callers.  The Ladies’ Aid came en masse and went out to the dining-room and there had tea and cake.  Harvey disappeared when they came.

“You are back,” he said, “and safe, and all that.  But it’s not their fault.  And I’ll be hanged if I’ll stand round and listen to them.”

He got his hat and then, finding her alone in a back hall for a moment, reverted uneasily to the subject.

“There are two sides to every story,” he said.  “They’re going to knife me this afternoon, all right.  Damned hypocrites!  You just keep your head, and I’ll tell you my side of it later.”

“Harvey,” she said slowly, “I want to know now just what you did.  I’m not angry.  I’ve never been angry.  But I ought to know.”

It was a very one-sided story that Harvey told her, standing in the little back hall, with Belle’s children hanging over the staircase and begging for cake.  Yet in the main it was true.  He had reached his limit of endurance.  She was in danger, as the photograph plainly showed.  And a fellow had a right to fight for his own happiness.

“I wanted you back, that’s all,” he ended.  And added an anticlimax by passing a plate of sliced jelly roll through the stair rail to the clamoring children.

Sara Lee stood there for a moment after he had gone.  He was right, or at least he had been within his rights.  She had never even heard of the new doctrine of liberty for women.  There was nothing in her training to teach her revolt.  She was engaged to Harvey; already, potentially, she belonged to him.  He had interfered with her life, but he had had the right to interfere.

And also there was in the back of her mind a feeling that was almost guilt.  She had let Henri tell her he loved her.  She had even kissed him.  And there had been many times in the little house when Harvey, for days at a time, had not even entered her thoughts.  There was, therefore, a very real tenderness in the face she lifted for his good-by kiss.

To Belle in the front hall Harvey gave a firm order.

“Don’t let any reporters in,” he said warningly.  “This is strictly our affair.  It’s a private matter.  It’s nobody’s business what she did over there.  She’s home.  That’s all that matters.”

Belle assented, but she was uneasy.  She knew that Harvey was unreasonably, madly jealous of Sara Lee’s work at the little house of mercy, and she knew him well enough to know that sooner or later he would show that jealousy.  She felt, too, that the girl should have been allowed her small triumph without interference.  There had been interference enough already.  But it was easier to yield to Harvey than to argue with him.

It was rather a worried Belle who served tea that afternoon in her dining room, with Mrs. Gregory pouring; the more uneasy, because already she divined a change in Sara Lee.  She was as lovely as ever, even lovelier.  But she had a poise, a steadiness, that were new; and silences in which, to Belle’s shrewd eyes, she seemed to be weighing things.