it
had made it very nice for all four of them, because Billy and Lucille
weren't war-fiances by any means. They had been engaged for a couple
of years, in a more or less silent fashion, and the war had given them
a chance to marry. One doesn't think so much about ways and means when
the man is going to war and can send you an allotment.

Francis, dark, quick, decided, with a careless gaiety that was like
that of a boy let out from school, had been a delightful person to pair
off with. And then the other two had been so wrapped up in the
wonderful chance to get married which opened out before them, that
marriage--a beautiful, golden, romantic thing--had been in the air.
One felt out of it if one didn't marry. Everybody else was marrying in
shoals. And Francis had been crazy over little Marjorie from the
moment he saw her--over her old-fashioned, whimsical ways, her small
defiances that covered up a good deal of shyness, over the littleness
and grace that made him want to pick her up and pet her and protect
her, he said . . . Marjorie could remember, even yet, with pleasure,
the lovely things he had said to her in that tense way he had on the
rare occasions when he wasn't laughing. She had fought off marrying
him till the very last minute. And then the very day before the
regiment sailed she had given in, and the other two--married two weeks
by then--had whisked her excitedly through it. And then they'd
recalled him--just two hours after they were married, while Marjorie
was sitting in the suite at the hotel, with Francis kneeling down by
her in his khaki, his arms around her waist, looking up at her
adoringly. She could see his face yet, uplifted and intense, and the
way it had turned to a mask when the knock came that announced the
telegram.

And it seemed now almost indecent that she should have let him kneel
there with his head against her laces, calling her his wife. She had
smiled down at him, then, shyly, and--half-proud, half-timid--had
thought it was very wonderful.

"When I see him it will be all right! When we meet it will all come
back!" she said half-aloud, walking restlessly up and down the office.
"It must. It will have to."

But in her heart she knew that she was wishing desperately that the war
had lasted ages longer, that he had been kept a year after the end of
the war instead of eight months; almost, down deep in her heart where
she couldn't get at it enough to deny it, that he had b