e
sworn that his heart-hunger would have declared her nearness at any hour
of that long period of search, and he told her so, but she laughed
again.

"That's in romance, Boone dear. We were in life."

"When was it?"

"It was on Fifth Avenue--just off of Washington Square, one night when
sleet was falling. I remember the wet pavements, because I had a hole in
one shoe. I was wrestling with an umbrella that the wind tried to turn
inside out--and we all but collided..."

"And you didn't speak to me!"

"No. I hurried away as fast as my feet could carry me--including the one
with the leaky shoe."

"But, Anne!" The reproach in his voice was almost an outcry, and the
girl laid a hand gently, for a moment, over his.

"If I'd let you find me, Boone--just then--I'd never have found myself.
It would have been surrender."

"But why!"

"Because--just then, I wasn't far from being hungry, and I was
very--very close to despair."

The man shuddered, and after a long silence he asked:

"But how did you come into this work?"

"It was logical enough. I graduated into it out of an East Side
settlement, but I went into _that_ because it was all I could get to do.
I don't deserve any credit."

She sketched for him what her life had been here in ruined and desolate
towns, and made him see vividly the picture of the reclamation work. She
had been in places where the war tide had flowed near and spoke
shudderingly of the stark things which a generous world had been slow to
believe, and at the end he told her of McCalloway's death, but not of
his true identity, for that one secret he might not share with her.

"And now," he questioned, "now that I have found you--after these years
of search?"

Her violet eyes met his, and he read in them an answer that sent
turbulent and rejoicing currents, like wine, through his veins.

"There is no one else, Boone--but I've enlisted for the war."

He nodded. "I shall soon be in uniform, too," he said. "I'm going to
come back here with some of those barbarians that I was born among--I
think it's with them I'd rather visit the German trenches. But when the
war is over, dearest--"

"_Apres la guerre_," she murmured. "How often have I heard that here!
After the war we shall have our lives."

A blind _poilu_ went by on the arm of a girl and, though his eyes were
covered with a bandage and his free hand moved gropingly, his laugh was
that of a lover, and not a hopeless one. Boone's fingers