ust. Gradually she had
won him over, so that now, when she was not in the room, he hunted up a
shoe or a glove, and sat with it until she came back.

"It is my self-respect, Jean-Joan."

She admitted that. "But--?"

"I can't stay out of the fighting and call myself a man. It has come
to that with me."

She knew that it had come to that. She had thought a great deal about
it. She lay awake at night thinking about it. She thought of it as
she sat by the General's bed, day after day, holding his hand.

The doctor's report had been cautious, but it had amounted to this--the
General might live to a green old age, some men rallied remarkably
after such a shock. He rather thought the General might rally, but
then again he might not, and anyhow he would be tied for months,
perhaps for years, to his chair.

The old man was giving to his daughter-in-law an affection compounded
of that which he had given to his wife and to his son. It was as if in
coming up the stairs in her white gown on her wedding day, Jean had
brought a bit of Edith back to him. For deep in his heart he knew that
without her, Derry would not have come.

So he clung pathetically to that little hand, which seemed the only
anchor in his sea of loneliness. Pathetically his old eyes begged her
to stay. "You won't leave me, Jean?" And she would promise, and sit
day after day and late into the night, holding his hand.

And as she sat with him, there grew up gradually within her a
conviction which strengthened as the days went by. She could tell the
very moment when she had first thought of it. She had left the General
with Bronson while she went to dress for dinner. Derry was waiting for
her, and usually she would have flown to him, glad of the moment when
they might be together. But something halted her at the head of the
stairs. It was as if a hand had been put in front of her, barring the
way.

The painted lady was looking at her with smiling eyes, but back of the
eyes she seemed to discern a wistful appeal--"I want you to stay. No
matter what happens I beg that you will stay."

But Jean didn't want to stay. All the youth in her rebelled against
the thing that she saw ahead of her. She yearned to be free--to live
and love as she pleased, not a prisoner in that shadowed room.

So she pushed it away from her, and so there came one morning a letter
from her father.

"Drusilla went over on the same boat. It was a surprising thing