make two men care for her as both Henri and Harvey
cared. In the humility of all modest women she was bewildered. It made
her rather silent and a little sad. She was so far from being what they
thought her.

Harvey, stealing a moment from the car to glance at her, saw something
baffling in her face.

"Do you still care, Sara Lee?" he asked almost diffidently. "As much as
ever?"

"I have come back to you," she said after an imperceptible pause.

"Well, I guess that's the answer."

He drew a deep satisfied breath. "I used to think of you over there,
and all those foreigners in uniform strutting about, and it almost got
me, some times."

And again, as long before, he read into her passivity his own passion,
and was deeply content.

Belle was waiting on the small front porch. There was an anxious frown
on her face, and she looked first, not at Sara Lee, but at Harvey. What
she saw there evidently satisfied her, for the frown disappeared. She
kissed Sara Lee impulsively.

All that afternoon, much to Harvey's resentment, Sara Lee received
callers. The Ladies' Aid came en masse and went out to the dining-room
and there had tea and cake. Harvey disappeared when they came.

"You are back," he said, "and safe, and all that. But it's not their
fault. And I'll be hanged if I'll stand round and listen to them."

He got his hat and then, finding her alone in a back hall for a moment,
reverted uneasily to the subject.

"There are two sides to every story," he said. "They're going to knife
me this afternoon, all right. Damned hypocrites! You just keep your
head, and I'll tell you my side of it later."

"Harvey," she said slowly, "I want to know now just what you did. I'm
not angry. I've never been angry. But I ought to know."

It was a very one-sided story that Harvey told her, standing in the
little back hall, with Belle's children hanging over the staircase and
begging for cake. Yet in the main it was true. He had reached his
limit of endurance. She was in danger, as the photograph plainly showed.
And a fellow had a right to fight for his own happiness.

"I wanted you back, that's all," he ended. And added an anticlimax by
passing a plate of sliced jelly roll through the stair rail to the
clamoring children.

Sara Lee stood there for a moment after he had gone. He was right, or
at least he had been within his rights. She had never even heard of the
new doctrine of liberty for women. There was nothing in her traini