want to thank you, when this terrible thing is
over and they learn about you!"

Mr. Travers had been eying Sara Lee.

"Didn't use you up, did it?" he asked. "You're not looking quite fit."

Sara Lee was very pale just then. In a moment she would know.

"I'm quite well," she said. "I--do you hear from Mrs. Cameron?"

"Frequently. She has worked hard, but she is not young." It was Mrs.
Travers who spoke. "She's afraid of the winter there. I rather think,
since you want to go back, that she will be glad to turn your domain
over to you for a time."

"Then--the little house is still there?"

"Indeed, yes! A very famous little house, indeed. But it is always
known as your house. She has felt like a temporary chatelaine. She
always thought you would come back."

Tea had come, as before. The momentary stir gave her a chance to brace
herself. Mr. Travers brought her cup to her and smiled gently down
at her.

"We have a plan to talk over," he said, "when you have had your tea. I
hope you will agree to it."

He went back to the hearthrug.

"When I was there before," Sara Lee said, trying to hold her cup steady,
"there was a young Belgian officer who was very kind to me. Indeed, all
the credit for what I did belongs to him. And since I went home I
haven't heard--"

Her voice broke suddenly. Mr. Travers glanced at his wife. Not for
nothing had Mrs. Cameron written her long letters to these old friends,
in the quiet summer afternoons when the sun shone down on the lifeless
street before the little house.

"I'm afraid we have bad news for you." Mrs. Travers put down her
untasted tea. "Or rather, we have no news. Of course," she added,
seeing Sara Lee's eyes, "in this war no news may be the best--that is,
he may be a prisoner."

"That," Sara Lee heard herself say, "is impossible. If they captured
him they would shoot him."

Mrs. Travers nodded silently. They knew Henri's business, too, by that
time, and that there was no hope for a captured spy.

"And--Jean?"

They did not know of Jean; so she told them, still in that far-away
voice. And at last Mrs. Travers brought an early letter of Mrs.
Cameron's and read a part of it aloud.

"He seems to have been delirious," she read, holding her reading glasses
to her eyes. "A friend of his, very devoted to him, was missing, and he
learned this somehow.

"He escaped from the hospital and got away in an ambulance. He came
straight here and wakened us. There had been a wo