course they will! I almost ran over an old gentleman outside here, and
it comes to me now that he said something like 'take your wife home for
to-day, my boy!' I was in such a hurry to get at you, Marge, that I
didn't listen. My wife! Good Lord, to think I have her again!"

She got her breath a little, and stopped shivering, and looked at him.
He had not changed much; one does not in fifteen months. It was the
same eager, dark young face, almost too sharply cut for a young man's,
with very bright dark eyes. The principal difference was in his
expression. Before he went he had had a great deal of expression, a
face that showed almost too much of what he thought. That was gone.
His face was younger-looking, because the flashing of changes over it
was gone. He looked wondering, very tired, and dulled somehow. And he
spoke without the turns of speech that she and her friends amused each
other with, the little quaintnesses of conscious fancy. "As if he'd
been talking to children," she thought.

Then she remembered that it was not that. He had been giving orders,
and taking them, and being on firing-lines; all the things that he had
written her about, and that had seemed so like story-books when she got
the letters. His being so changed made it real for the first
time. . . . And then an unworthy feeling--as if she simply could not
face the romantic and tender eyes of all the office--everybody having
the same feelings about her that Miss Kaplan had, even if they were
well-bred enough to phrase them politely.

"Shall we go?" she asked abruptly, while this feeling was strong in her.

"Not for a minute. I want to see the place where my wife has spent her
last year . . ."

He stood with his arm still around her--would he never stop touching
her?--and surveyed the office with the same sort of affectionate
amusement he might have given to a workbasket of hers, or a piece of
embroidery. Marjorie slipped from under his arm and put her hat on.

"I'm ready now," she said.

They walked out of the little office, and through the long aisle down
the center of the floor of the office-building, Marjorie, still
miserably conscious of the eyes, and the emotions behind the eyes, and
quite as conscious that they were emotions that she ought to be ashamed
of minding.

"Now where shall we go for luncheon?" demanded Francis joyously, as
they got outside. He caught her hand in his surreptitiously and said
"You darling!" und