“But to move, mademoiselle, only to the next village!” they would remonstrate, and as a final argument:  “You are too valuable to risk an injury.”

“I must remain here,” she said.  And some of them thought they understood.  When an unusually obdurate officer came along, Sara Lee would insist on taking him to the cellar.

“You see!” she would say, holding her candle high.  “It is a nice cellar, warm and dry.  It is”—­proudly—­“one of the best cellars in the village.  It is a really homelike cellar.”

The officer would go away then, and send her cigarettes for her men or, as in more than one case, a squad with bags of earth and other things to protect the little house as much as possible.  After a time the little house began to represent the ideas in protection and camouflage, then in its early stages, of many different minds.

Rene shot a man there one night, a skulking figure working its way in the shadows up the street.  It was just before dawn, and Rene, who was sleepless those days, like the others, called to him.  The man started to run, dodging behind walls.  But Rene ran faster and killed him.

He was a German in Belgian peasant’s clothing.  But he wore the great shoes of the German soldier, and he had been making a rough map of the Belgian trenches.

Sara Lee did not see him.  But when she heard the shot she went out, and Rene told her breathlessly.

From that time on her terrors took the definite form of Henri lying dead in a ruined street, and being buried, as this man was buried, without ceremony and without a prayer, in some sodden spring field.

XVIII

As the spring advanced Harvey grew increasingly bitter; grew morbid and increasingly self-conscious also.  He began to think that people were smiling behind his back, and when they asked about Sara Lee he met with almost insulting brevity what he felt was half-contemptuous kindness.  He went nowhere, and worked all day and until late in the night.  He did well in his business, however, and late in March he received a substantial raise in salary.  He took it without enthusiasm, and told Belle that night at dinner with apathy.

After the evening meal it was now his custom to go to his room and there, shut in, to read.  He read no books on the war, and even the quarter column entitled Salient Points of the Day’s War News hardly received a glance from him now.

In the office when the talk turned to the war, as it did almost hourly, he would go out or scowl over his letters.

“Harvey’s hit hard,” they said there.

“He’s acting like a rotten cub,” was likely to be the next sentence.  But sometimes it was:  “Well, what’d you expect?  Everything ready to get married, and the girl beating it for France without notice!  I’d be sore myself.”

On the day of the raise in salary his sister got the children to bed and straightened up the litter of small garments that seemed always to bestrew the house, even to the lower floor.  Then she went into Harvey’s room.  Coat and collar off, he was lying on the bed, but not reading.  His book lay beside him, and with his arms under his head he was staring at the ceiling.