could find no answer to her question. Why couldn't he? He
looked at her thoughtfully with the frown of his problem in his eyes.
What change had come over her? Or was it he who was altered? She had
seemed so absolutely his while the terror of battle had kept them apart.
She had written and acted as though she was his right up to---- Yes,
right up to the point when he had been in a position to claim her.

Between him and Terry there had been no engagement--only a wealth of
interchanged affection; interchanged for the most part on paper. Once
and only once had marriage been mentioned--on the night that he had set
out for the first time for the Front. "You won't ask me, Tabs; I know
that. You're too honorable. So I've got to say it. When you come back
I'm going to marry you."

"_If_ I come back, little Terry," he had corrected.

"But you will--you must," she had pleaded, "for my sake."

"I'll try. I'll try so hard," he had promised. "But I won't marry you
till I'm out of khaki or the war is ended."

"And I'll meet you at the train the moment you're free and we'll be
married that very day."

All this five years ago on a murky station in the tragedy of parting,
while Belgium was being trampled and the troop-train waited. She had
eluded the vigilance of her parents and had met him outside the
barracks, without forewarning. Through the gloom of streets and the blur
of the accompanying crowd, he had seen her face loom up. Her arm had
slipped through his; she had marched beside him like any Tommy's
sweetheart. She had been seventeen at the time; to-day she was
two-and-twenty. In the years that had followed he had taken no step to
make that girlish promise binding, yet increasingly its fulfillment had
been the goal towards which he had struggled.

After she had joined Lady Dawn's Nursing Unit and had gone to France he
had missed her on his leaves; by some fatality they had been always
missing. She had existed for him only in their correspondence and in his
vivid imagination. And now, after so much hoping, she had become again a
reality. He had been prepared for strangeness, but not for---- Was it
her youth, which was to have flung wide all doors, that formed the
barricade? Her youth which, if shared, would have put back the hands on
the face of Time! Her relentless, flaunting youth! Youth which is
forever hostile to age!

Her growing and puzzled expression of impatience forced him to narrow
his answer to the requirements