upset me. That was all."

In her mind there was fixed firmly the one thing, that she mustn't be a
coward, she must go through with it, she must pretend well enough to
make Francis think she felt the way she ought to. The Francis of
pre-war times would have been fooled; but this man had been judging men
and events that took as keen a mind as seeing through a frightened
girl. He looked at her musingly, his face never changing. She rose
and came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. She even
managed to laugh.

"Do you mind my being upset?" she asked.

"No," he said, "if that's all it is. But you have a particular kind of
terror about you that I don't like. Or I think you have."

She took her hand away, hurt by the harshness of his voice--then,
seeing his face, understood that he was not knowingly harsh. She had
hurt him terribly by that one unguarded moment, and she would have to
work very hard to put it out of sight.

"I--I haven't any terror----" she began to say.

He made himself smile a little at that.

"You mustn't have," he said. "We'll sit down on the davenport over
there that Lucille's grandmother gave her for a wedding-present--you
see how well I remember the news about all the furniture? And we'll
talk about it all quietly."

"There's nothing to talk about," said Marjorie desperately. She went
obediently over to the davenport and sat down by him.

"You were upset at seeing me?" he began.

"It was--well, it was so sudden!" dimpled Marjorie, quoting the tag
with the sudden whimsicality which even death would probably find her
using.

"And I still seem--do I seem like a strange person to you, dear?" he
asked wistfully. "You don't seem strange to me, you know. You seem
like the wife I love."

The worst of it was that when Francis was gay and like a playmate, as
he had been at their luncheon before Logan came, she could feel that
things were nearly all right. But when he spoke as he was speaking now
the terror of him came back worse than ever.

"No. No, you don't seem strange at all," she said. "Why should you?"
But while she spoke the words she knew they were not true. She looked
at him, and his face was like a stranger's face. She had known other
men as well as she had known her husband, except for the brief while
when she had promised to marry him. She took stock of his features;
the straight, clearly marked black brows under the mark the cap made on
his forehead; the rat