going away from me----"

"I think it's the laughter that I miss most," she said presently;
"you've grown so stern."

"I've seen stern things happen--a kind of Judgment Day. It's remembered
things that are so silencing."

"I know what you mean. I saw some of those things in our hospital in
France." She shut her eyes as if the memory was unbearable. "But don't
be hard on people who have a right to be young and who want to forget.
It isn't that they're ungrateful." Then she surprised him, "People like
Maisie and myself."

"Don't couple yourself with her." He spoke more sharply than he had
intended.

"But she was with me out there," she expostulated. "That was how she met
her second husband, Gervis. She nursed him."

"It makes no difference how she met him; she's not in your class--a
woman who has been divorced three times."

"But she hasn't. Whatever made you think that?" Terry shot upright on
her chair, for all the world like a startled rabbit.

"You told me she'd had three husbands." He was once more puzzled and
uncertain of his ground. "You as good as said that she wouldn't be
averse to making a fourth of Adair. I therefore conjectured----"

"You conjectured all wrong," she cut him short. "They died for their
country."

"All of them?" He was making a rapid calculation as to how long could
have elapsed between each re-marriage.

"One at a time, of course," she added. "She was married to the first
the first week of the war."

"Even so it was quick work. May I light a cigarette? Three husbands in
four years! She must be a very alluring person!"

Terry laughed nervously. "She is, though you mayn't think it. I can see
you don't; you think she's horrid. But let me tell you it takes a smart
woman to bring three men to the point of matrimony when the world's so
full of unmarried girls. And they were every one of them more or less
famous--the kind of men of whom any woman would be proud. You'll
remember Pollock--Reggie Pollock; he was one of the earliest of our
aces--the man who brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and got killed
himself a few days later, no one quite knew how. There was a mystery
about his death. He was the man to whom she was first married."

"A splendid chap! And I recall her now. Her portrait was in the
illustrated papers at the time of her third marriage. It was headed _A
Conscientious War-Worker_ or something like that. And I don't forget the
name the soldiers called her when they rea