e sore at you. They
think you threw them down." He liked to air his American slang.

Edith cupped her chin in her hand and looked at him. There was no
mystery about the situation, no shyness in the eyes with which she
appraised him. She was beginning to like him too.

That night when she got back to Mabel's apartment her mood was
reckless. She went to the window and stood looking at the crooked
and chimney-potted skyline that was London.

"Oh, what's the use?" she said savagely, and gave up the fight.

When Mabel came home she told her.

"I'm going to get out," she said without preamble.

She caught the relief in Mabel's face, followed by a purely
conventional protest.

"Although," she hedged cautiously, "I don't know, dearie. People
look at things sensibly these days. You've got to live, haven't you?
They're mighty quick to jail a girl who tries to jump in the river
when she's desperate."

"I'll probably end there. And I don't much care."

Mabel gave her a good talking to about that. Her early training had
been in a church which regarded self-destruction as a cardinal sin.
Then business acumen asserted itself:

"He'll probably put you on somewhere. He's crazy about you, Ede."

But Edith was not listening. She was standing in front of her opened
trunk tearing into small pieces something that had been lying in the
tray.

VII

Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that
had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use
his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land
but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried
feebly to move his right arm.

But it was gone.

At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there
beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But
when he looked it was not there.

There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he
roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.

The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had
taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always
there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened
with his eyes on her face--eyes like those of a sick child.

In that manner they got by the first few days.

"It won't make any difference to her," he said once. "She'd take me
back if I was only a fragment." Then bitterly: "That's all I am--a
fragment! A part of a man!"

After