nd then he went out to the
theatre with his wife or to dine with friends. But, as a rule, she went
alone. She had a limousine, a chauffeur, a low swung touring car--and an
electric. Her red hair was still wonderful, and she dressed herself
quite understanding in grays and whites and greens. If she did not wear
habitually her air of gay youth, it was revived in her now and then when
something pleased or excited her. And her eyes would shine as they had
shone in the hospital when Ridgeley Dunbar had first bent over her bed.

They shone on Christopher Carr when he came home from the war. He was a
friend of her husband. Or rather, as a student in the medical school, he
had listened to the lectures of the older man, and had made up his mind
to know him personally, and had thus, by sheer persistence, linked their
lives together.

Anne had never met him. He had been in India When she had married
Ridgeley, and then there had been a few years in Egypt where he had
studied some strange germ, of which she could never remember the name.
He had plenty of money, hence he was not tied to a practice. But when
the war began, he had offered his services, and had made a great record.
"He is one of the big men of the future," Ridgeley Dunbar had said.

But when Christopher came back with an infected arm, which might give
him trouble, it was not the time to talk of futures. He was invited to
spend July at the Dunbars' country home in Connecticut, and Ridgeley
brought him out at the week-end.

The Connecticut estate consisted of a rambling stone house, an
old-fashioned garden, and beyond the garden a grove of white birches.

"What a heavenly place," Christopher said, toward the end of dinner;
"how did you happen to find it?"

"Oh, Anne did it. She motored for weeks, and she bought it because of
the birches."

Anne's eyes were shining. "I'll show them to you after dinner."

She had decided at once that she liked Christopher. He still wore his
uniform, and had the look of a soldier. But it wasn't that--it was the
things he had been saying ever since the soup was served. No one had
talked of the war as he talked of it. There had been other doctors whose
minds had been on arms and legs--amputated; on wounds and shell
shock--And there had been a few who had sentimentalized. But Christopher
had seemed neither to resent the frightfulness nor to care about the
moral or spiritual consequences. He had found in it all a certain beauty
of which