a card to him.

Jean ate her duckling in flaming silence, ate her salad, ate her ice,
drank her coffee, and was glad when the meal ended.

The war from the beginning had been for her a sacred cause. She had
yearned to be a man that she might stand in the forefront of battle.
She had envied the women of Russia who had formed a Battalion of Death.
Her father had laughed at her. "You'd be like a white kitten in a dog
fight."

It seemed intolerable that tongues should be busy with this talk of
young Drake's cowardice. He had seemed something so much more than
that. And he was a man--with a man's right to leadership. What was
the matter with him?

The night before she had slept little--Derry's voice--Derry's eyes!
She had gone over every word that he had said. She had risen early in
the morning to write in her memory book, and she had drawn a most
entrancing border about the page, with melting strawberry ice, lilies
of France, Cinderella slippers, and red-ink lobsters, rather
nightmarishly intermingled!

He had seemed so fine--so--she fell back on her much overworked word
_wonderful_--her heart had run to meet him, and now--it would have to
run back again. How silly she had been not to see.

After dinner they danced in the Long Room, which was rather famous from
a decorative point of view. It was medieval in effect, with a balcony
and tapestries, and some precious bits of armor. There was a lion-skin
flung over the great chair where Mrs. Witherspoon was enthroned.

Between dances, Jean and Ralph sat on the balcony steps, and talked of
many things which brought the red to Jean's cheeks, and a troubled
light into her eyes.

And it was from the balcony-steps that, as the evening waned, she saw
Derry Drake standing in the great arched doorway.

There was a black velvet curtain behind him which accentuated his
fairness. He did not look nineteen. Jean had a fleeting vision of a
certain steel engraving of the "Princes in the Tower" which had hung in
her grandmother's house. Derry was not in the least like those lovely
imprisoned boys, yet she had an overwhelming sense of his kinship to
them.

As young Drake's eyes swept the room, he was aware of Jean on the
balcony steps. She was in white and silver, with a touch of that
heavenly blue which seemed to belong to her. Her crinkled hair was
combed quaintly over her ears and back from her forehead. He smiled at
her, but she apparently did not see him.

He