Sara Lee held it listlessly in her hands.

“Shall I tell him, Belle?” she asked.

Belle hesitated.

“I don’t believe I would,” she said forlornly.  “He won’t like it.  That’s why I’ve never showed him that clipping.  He hates it all so.”

Sara Lee dressed that evening in the white frock.  She dressed slowly, thinking hard.  All round her was the shiny newness of her furniture, a trifle crowded in Belle’s small room.  Sara Lee had a terrible feeling of being fastened in by it.  Wherever she turned it gleamed.  She felt surrounded, smothered.

She had meant to make a clean breast of things—­of the little house, and of Henri, and of the King, pinning the medal on her shabby black jacket and shaking hands with her.  Henri she must tell about—­not his name of course, nor his madness, nor even his love.  But she felt that she owed it to Harvey to have as few secrets from him as possible.  She would tell about what the boy had done for her, and how he, and he alone, had made it all possible.

Surely Harvey would understand.  It was a page that was closed.  It had held nothing to hurt him.  She had come back.

She stood by her window, thinking.  And a breath of wind set the leaves outside to rustling.  Instantly she was back again in the little house, and the sound was not leaves, but the shuffling of many stealthy feet on the cobbles of the street at night, that shuffling that was so like the rustling of leaves in a wood or the murmur of water running over a stony creek bed.

XXV

It was clear to Sara Lee from the beginning of the evening that Harvey did not intend to hear her story.  He did not say so; indeed, for a time he did not talk at all.  He sat with his arms round her, content just to have her there.

“I have a lot of arrears to make up,” he said.  “I’ve got to get used to having you where I can touch you.  To-night when I go upstairs I’m going to take that damned colorless photograph of you and throw it out the window.”

“I must tell you about your photograph,” she ventured.  “It always stood on the mantel over the stove, and when there was a threatened bombardment I used to put it under—­”

“Let’s not talk, honey.”

When he came out of that particular silence he said abruptly: 

“Will Leete is dead.”

“Oh, no!  Poor Will Leete.”

“Died of pneumonia in some God-forsaken hole over there.  He’s left a wife and nothing much to keep her.  That’s what comes of mixing in the other fellow’s fight.  I guess we can get the house as soon as we want it.  She has to sell; and it ought to be a bargain.”

“Harvey,” she said rather timidly, “you speak of the other fellow’s fight.  They say over there that we are sure to be drawn into it sooner or later.”