some such man Audrey would marry. Perhaps already, in France--

He got up. His desk was covered with papers, neatly endorsed by his
secretary. He turned out all the lights but his desk lamp. Natalie's
gleaming flesh-tones died into the shadows, and he stood for a moment,
looking up at it, a dead thing, remote, flat, without significance. Then
he sat down at his desk and took up a bundle of government papers.

There was still work. Thank God for work.

CHAPTER L

Audrey was in Paris on the eleventh of November. Now and then she
got back there, and reveled for a day or two in the mere joy of paved
streets and great orderly buildings. She liked the streets and the
crowds. She liked watching the American boys swaggering along, smoking
innumerable cigarets and surveying the city with interested, patronizing
eyes. And, always, walking briskly along the Rue Royale or the Avenue de
l'Opera, or in the garden of the Tuileries where the school-boys played
their odd French games, her eyes were searching the faces of the men she
met.

Any tall man in civilian clothes set her heart beating faster. She was
quite honest with herself; she knew that she was watching for Clay, and
she had a magnificent shamelessness in her quest. And now at last The
Daily Mail had announced his arrival in France, and at first every
ring of her telephone had sent her to it, somewhat breathless but quite
confident. He would, she considered, call up the Red Cross at the Hotel
Regina, and they would, by her instructions, give her hotel.

Then, on that Monday morning, which was the eleventh, she realized that
he would not call her up. She knew it suddenly and absolutely. She sat
down, when the knowledge came to her, with a sickening feeling that if
he did not come to her now he never would come. Yet even then she did
not doubt that he cared. Cared as desperately as she did. The bond still
held.

She tried very hard, sitting there by her wood fire in the orderly
uniform which made her so quaintly young and boyish, to understand the
twisted mental processes that kept him away from her, now that he was
free. And, in the end, she came rather close to the truth: his sense
of failure; his loss of confidence in himself where his love life was
concerned; the strange twisting and warping that were Natalie's sole
legacy from their years together.

For months she had been tending broken bodies and broken spirits. But
the broken pride of a man was a strange