There was the business of checking them off, and the further business of Sara Lee’s paying for them in gold.  She sat at the table, Jean across, and struggled with centimes and francs and louis d’or, an engrossed frown between her eyebrows.

Jean, sitting across, thought her rather changed.  She smiled very seldom, and her eyes were perhaps more steady.  It was a young girl he and Henri had brought out to the little house.  It was a very serious and rather anxious young woman who sat across from him and piled up the money he had brought back into little stacks.

“Jean,” she said finally, “I am not going to be able to do it.”

“To do what?”

“To continue—­here.”

“No?”

“You see I had a little money of my own, and twenty pounds I got in London.  You and—­and Henri have done miracles for me.  But soon I shall have used all my own money, except enough to take me back.  And now I shall have to start on my English notes.  After that—­”

“You are too good to the men.  These cigarettes, now—­you could do without them.”

“But they are very cheap, and they mean so much, Jean.”

She sat still, her hands before her on the table.  From the kitchen came the bubbling of the eternal soup.  Suddenly a tear rolled slowly down her cheek.  She had a hatred of crying in public, but Jean apparently did not notice.

“The trouble, mademoiselle, is that you are trying to feed and comfort too many.”

“Jean,” she said suddenly, “where is Henri?”

“In England, I think.”

The only clear thought in Sara Lee’s mind was that Henri was not in France, and that he had gone without telling her.  She had hurt him horribly.  She knew that.  He might never come back to the little house of mercy.  There was, in Henri, for all his joyousness, an implacable strain.  And she had attacked his honor.  What possible right had she to do that?

The memory of all his thoughtful kindness came back, and it was a pale and distracted Sara Lee who looked across the table at Jean.

“Did he tell you anything?”

“Nothing, mademoiselle.”

“He is very angry with me, Jean.”

“But surely no, mademoiselle.  With you?  It is impossible.”

But though they said nothing more, Jean considered the matter deeply.  He understood now, for instance, a certain strangeness in Henri’s manner before his departure.  They had quarreled, these two.  Perhaps it was as well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee.  But he looked out, those days, on but half a world, did Jean.  So he saw only the woman hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper.  And in Sara Lee a woman, and nothing more.

And—­being Jean he shrugged his shoulders.

They fell to discussing ways and means.  The chocolate could be cut out, but not the cigarettes.  Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them.  Somehow Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval.  He gave her no moral support.