The next night Henri was to go through the lines again.  Since his wounding he had been working on the Allied side, and fewer lights there were in his district that flashed the treacherous message across the flood, between night and morning.  But now it was imperative that he go through the German lines again.  It was feared that with grappling hooks the enemy was slowly and cautiously withdrawing the barbed wire from the inundated fields; and that could mean but one thing.

On the night he was to go Henri called Sara Lee from the crowded salle a manger and drawing her into the room across closed the door.

“Mademoiselle,” he said gravely, “once before, long ago, you permitted me to kiss you.  Will you do that for me again?”

She kissed him at once gravely.  Once she would have flushed.  She did not now.  For there was a change in Sara Lee as well as in her outlook.  She had been seeing for months the shortness of life, the brief tenure men held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hours that remained.  She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and her charm of youth.  Values had changed.  To love, and to show that love, to cheer, to comfort and help—­that was necessary, because soon the chance might be gone, and there would be long aching years of regret.

So she kissed him gravely and looked up into his eyes, her own full of tears.

“God bless and keep you, dear Henri,” she said.

Then she went back to her work.

XXII

Much of Sara Lee’s life at home had faded.  She seemed to be two people.  One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it away from Uncle James’ kind but curious eyes.  And one was this present Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer horribly, not to gain anything—­except perhaps some honorable advancement for their souls—­but that there might be preserved, at any cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God.

She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future.  So she was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers and at last its sleep.  Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter.  She reread his letters often, but they were forced.  And after a time she realized another quality in them.  They were self-centered.  It was his anxiety, his loneliness, his humiliation.  Sara Lee’s eyes were looking out, those days, over a suffering world.  Harvey’s eyes were turned in on himself.

She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself.  What she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come sometime—­that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that day, that he would say things that he would regret later.  Sometimes the thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her hands would tremble.