"I have already told you, Harvey," Belle put in. "It is my own idea.
She is tired. She's been through a lot. I've heard the story you're
too stubborn to listen to. And I strongly advise her to wait a while."

And after a time he agreed ungraciously. He would buy the house and fix
it over, and in the early fall it would be ready.

"Unless," he added to Sara Lee with a bitterness born of
disappointment--"unless you change your mind again."

He did not kiss her that night when she and Belle went together up the
stairs. But he stared after her gloomily, with hurt and bewilderment in
his eyes.

He did not understand. He never would. She had come home to him all
gentleness and tenderness, ready to find in him the things she needed so
badly. But out of his obstinacy and hurt he had himself built up a
barrier.

That night Sara Lee dreamed that she was back in the little house of
mercy. Rene was there; and Henri; and Jean, with the patch over his eye.
They were waiting for the men to come, and the narrow hall was full of
the odor of Marie's soup. Then she heard them coming, the shuffling of
many feet on the road. She went to the door, with Henri beside her, and
watched them coming up the road, a deeper shadow in the blackness--tired
men, wounded men, homeless men coming to her little house with its
firelight and its warmth. Here and there the match that lighted a
cigarette showed a white but smiling face. They stopped before the door,
and the warm little house, with its guarded lights and its food and
cheer, took them in.

XXVII

Very pale and desperate, Henri took the night A train for Folkestone
after he had said good-by to Sara Lee. He alternately chilled and
burned with fever, and when he slept, as he did now and then, going off
suddenly into a doze and waking with a jerk, it was to dream of horrors.

He thought, in his wilder intervals, of killing himself. But his code
did not include such a shirker's refuge. He was going back to tell his
story and to take his punishment.

He had cabled to Jean to meet him at Calais, but when, at dawn the next
morning, the channel boat drew in to the wharf there was no sign of
Jean or the car. Henri regarded the empty quay with apathetic eyes.
They would come, later on. If he could only get his head down and sleep
for a while he would be better able to get toward the Front. For he
knew now that he was ill. He had, indeed, been ill for days, but he did
not realize that