yhow, it's a thing I shouldn't
care to tell Natalie."

"What do you mean, not care to tell Natalie?"

"Hard work doesn't make a man forget how to smile."

"Oh, come now. He's cheerful enough. If you mean because Graham's
fighting?"

"That's only part of it," said Mrs. Terry, sagely, and relapsed into
one of the poignant silences that drove old Terry to a perfect frenzy of
curiosity.

Then, in January of 1918, a crisis came to Clayton and Natalie Spencer.
Graham was wounded.

Clayton was at home when the news came. Natalie had been having one of
her ill-assorted, meticulously elaborate dinner-parties, and when the
guests had gone they were for a moment alone in the drawing-room
of their town house. Clayton was fighting in himself the sense of
irritation Natalie's dinners always left, especially the recent ones.
She was serving, he knew, too much food. In the midst of the agitation
on conservation, her dinners ran their customary seven courses. There
was too much wine, too. But it occurred to him that only the wine had
made the dinner endurable.

Then he tried to force himself into better humor. Natalie was as she
was, and if, in an unhappy, struggling, dying world she found happiness
in display, God knew there was little enough happiness. He was not at
home very often. He could not spoil her almost childish content in the
small things that made up her life.

"I think it was very successful," she said, surveying herself in one of
the corner mirrors. "Do you like my gown, Clay?"

"It's very lovely."

"It's new. I've been getting some clothes, Clay. You'll probably shriek
at the bills. But all this talk about not buying clothes is nonsense,
you know. The girls who work in the shops have to live."

"Naturally. Of course there is other work open to them now."

"In munition plants, I daresay. To be blown up!"

He winced. The thought of that night the year before, when the plant
went, still turned him sick.

"Don't buy too many things, my dear," he said, gently. "You know how
things are."

"I know it's your fault that they are as they are," she persisted. "Oh,
I know it was noble of you, and all that. The country's crazy about you.
But still I think it was silly. Every one else is making money out of
things, and you--a lot of thanks you'll get, when the war's over."

"I don't particularly want thanks."

Then the door-bell rang in the back of the house, and Buckham answered
it. He was conscious at once tha