Henri had not returned when, the second day after Rene’s death, the letter came which recalled her.  She opened it eagerly.  Though from Harvey there usually came at the best veiled reproach, the society had always sent its enthusiastic approval.

She read it twice before she understood, and it was only when she read Belle’s letter again that she began to comprehend.  She was recalled; and the recall was Harvey’s work.

She was very close to hating him that day.  He had never understood.  She would go back to him, as she had promised; but always, all the rest of their lives, there would be this barrier between them.  To the barrier of his bitterness would be added her own resentment.  She could never even talk to him of her work, of those great days when in her small way she had felt herself a part of the machinery of mercy of the war.

Harvey had lost something out of Sara Lee’s love for him.  He had done it himself, madly, despairingly.  She still loved him, she felt.  Nothing could change that or her promise to him.  But with that love there was something now of fear.  And she felt, too, that after all the years she had known him she had not known him at all.  The Harvey she had known was a tender and considerate man, soft-spoken, slow to wrath, always gentle.  But the Harvey of his letters and of the recall was a stranger.

It was the result of her upbringing, probably, that she had no thought of revolt.  Her tie to Harvey was a real tie.  By her promise to him her life was no longer hers to order.  It belonged to some one else, to be ordered for her.  But, though she accepted, she was too clear a thinker not to resent.

When Henri returned, toward dawn of the following night, he did not come alone.  Sara Lee, rising early, found two men in her kitchen—­one of them Henri, who was making coffee, and a soldier in a gray-green uniform, with a bad bruise over one eye and a sulky face.  His hands were tied, but otherwise he sat at ease, and Henri, having made the coffee, held a cup to his lips.

“It is good for the spirits, man,” he said in German.  “Drink it.”

The German took it, first gingerly, then eagerly.  Henri was in high good humor.

“See, I have brought you a gift!” he exclaimed on seeing Sara Lee.  “What shall we do with him?  Send him to America?  To show the appearance of the madmen of Europe?”

The prisoner was only a boy, such a boy as Henri himself; but a peasant, and muscular.  Beside his bulk Henri looked slim as a reed.  Henri eyed him with a certain tolerant humor.

“He is young, and a Bavarian,” he said.  “Other wise I should have killed him, for he fought hard.  He has but just been called.”

There was another conference in the little house that morning, but Henri’s prisoner could tell little.  He had heard nothing of an advance.  Further along the line it was said that there was much fighting.  He sat there, pale and bewildered and very civil, and in the end his frightened politeness brought about a change in the attitude of the men who questioned him.  Hate all Germans as they must, who had suffered so grossly, this boy was not of those who had outraged them.