er his breath. For a minute the old magic of his
swift courtship came back to her, and she forgot the miserable
oppression of facing fifty years of wedded life with a stranger; and
she smiled up at him. Then, as he caught her hand in his, quite
undisguisedly this time, and held it under his arm, the repulsion came
back.

"Anywhere you like," she answered his question.

"We'll go to the biggest, wildest, wooliest place in the city, where
the band plays the most music," he announced. "Going to celebrate.
Come on, honey. And then I have a fine surprise for you, as soon as we
go back to the flat. Lucille won't be back till five, will she? And
thank goodness for that!"

Lucille and Marjorie, pending the return of their husbands, shared a
tiny flat far uptown on the west side. Marjorie had described it at
length in her letters, until Francis had said that he could find his
way around it if he walked in at midnight. But his intimacy with it
made her feel that there was no place on earth she could call her own.

"Tell me now," she demanded.

Francis laughed again, and shook his head.

"It will do you good to guess. Come now, which--Sherry's or the Plaza
or the Ritz?"

"Sherry's--they're going to close it soon, poor old place!"

"Then we'll celebrate its obsequies," said Francis, grinning cheerfully.

Before he went he had smiled, somehow, as if he had been to a very
excellent college and a super-fine prep school of many traditions--as,
indeed, he had--but now it was exactly the grin, Marjorie realized,
still with a feeling of unworthiness, of the soldier, sailor, and
marine grinning so artlessly from the War Camp Community posters. In
his year of foreign service, Francis had shaken off the affectations of
his years, making him, at twenty-five, a much older and more valuable
man than Marjorie had parted with. But she didn't like it, or what she
glimpsed of it. Whether he was gay in this simple, new way, or grave
in the frighteningly old one, he was not the Francis she had built up
for herself from a month's meetings and a few memories.

He smiled at her flashingly again as they settled themselves at the
little table in just the right spot and place they had chosen.

"Wondering whether I'll eat with my knife?" he demanded, quite at
random as it happened, but altogether too close to Marjorie's feelings
to be comfortable.

She colored up to her hair.

"No--no! I _know_ you wouldn't do that!" she assever