to divorce Dicky
and marry Jack, even though Jack himself had never whispered such a
solution of my life's problem. That she believed me to be responsible
for his going to the war I knew. I dreaded inexpressibly the idea of
facing her.

But when, after a rather silent trip to the city with Dicky, I stood
again in Mrs. Stewart's little upstairs sitting-room, I found only a
very sorrowful old woman, not a reproachful one.

"I thought you'd come today," she said, and her voice was tired,
dispirited. I felt a sudden compunction seize me that my visits to her
had been so few since Jack's going.

"I couldn't have kept away," I said, and then my old friend dropped my
hand, which she had been holding, and, sinking into a chair, put her
wrinkled old hands up to her face. I saw the slow tears trickling
through her fingers, and I knelt by her side and drew her head against
my shoulder, comforting her as she once had comforted me.

Mrs. Stewart was never one to give way to emotion, and it was but a
few moments before she drew herself erect, wiped her eyes, and said
quietly:

"I'll show you the cablegram."

She went to her desk, and drew out the message, clipped, abbreviated
in the puzzling fashion of cablegrams:

"Regret inform you, Bickett killed, action French front. Details
later."

(Signed) "CAILLARD."

"Caillard? Caillard?" Where had I heard that name? Then I suddenly
remembered. Paul Caillard was the friend with whom Jack had gone
across the ocean to the Great War. I examined the paper carefully.

"I thought Dicky said you received the usual official notification," I
remarked.

"That's what I told him," she replied. "That's it."

"But this isn't an official message," I persisted.

"Why isn't it?"

I explained the difference haltingly, and spoke of the wonderful
system of identification in the French army, with every man tagged
with a metal identification check.

"You will probably receive the official notification in a few days," I
commented.

A queer, startled expression flashed into her face. She opened her
mouth, as if to speak, and then, looking at me sharply, closed
it again. Reaching out her hand for the cablegram, she folded it
mechanically, as if thinking of something far away, then going to her
desk, put it away, and stood as if thinking deeply for two or three
minutes, which seemed an hour to me.

At last I saw her body straighten. She gave a little shake of her
shoulders, as if rousi