Sara Lee sat with her hands clenched.  Mrs. Travers folded the letter and put it back into its envelope.

“How long ago was that?” Sara Lee asked in a low tone.  “Because, if he was coming back at all—­”

“Four months.”

Suddenly Sara Lee stood up.

“I think I ought to tell you,” she said with a dead-white face, “that I am responsible.  He cared for me; and I was in love with him too.  Only I didn’t know it then.  I let him bring me to England, because—­I suppose it was because I loved him.  I didn’t think then that it was that.  I was engaged to a man at home.”

“Sit down,” said Mr. Travers.  “My dear child, nothing can be your fault.”

“He came with me, and the Germans got through.  He had had word, but—­”

“Have you your salts?” Mr. Travers asked quietly of his wife.

“I’m not fainting.  I’m only utterly wretched.”

The Traverses looked at each other.  They were English.  They had taken their own great loss quietly, because it was an individual grief and must not be intruded on the sorrow of a nation.  But they found this white-faced girl infinitely appealing, a small and fragile figure, to whose grief must be added, without any fault of hers, a bitter and lasting remorse.

Sara Lee stood up and tried to smile.

“Please don’t worry about me,” she said.  “I need something to do, that’s all.  You see, I’ve been worrying for so long.  If I can get to work and try to make up I’ll not be so hopeless.  But I am not quite hopeless, either,” she added hastily.  It was as though by the very word she had consigned Henri to death.  “You see, I am like the men; I won’t give him up.  And perhaps some night he will come across from the other side, out of the dark.”

Mr. Travers took her back to the hotel.  When he returned from paying off the taxi he found her looking across at the square.

“Do you remember,” she asked him, “the time when the little donkey was hurt over there?”

“I shall never forget it.”

“And the young officer who ran out when I did, and shot the poor thing?”

Mr. Travers remembered.

“That was he—­the man we have been speaking of.”

For the first time that day her eyes filled with tears.

Sara Lee, at twenty, was already living in her memories.

So again the lights went down in front, and the back drop became but a veil, and invisible.  And to Sara Lee there came back again some of the characters of the early mise en scene—­marching men, forage wagons, squadrons of French cavalry escorting various staffs, commandeered farm horses with shaggy fetlocks fastened in rope corrals, artillery rumbling along rutted roads which shook the gunners almost off the limbers.