t from anything else--" She gave
her sudden burst of laughter.

He felt arise within him violent and horrible feelings about her. "What
are you laughing at?"

"Well, do just imagine what you'd look like in private soldier's
clothing!" She laughed very heartily again.

He turned away.

CHAPTER VII

I

Up in his room he began a long letter to Nona, pouring out to her all
his feelings about this second rejection. He was writing to her--and
hearing from her--regularly and frequently now. It was his only vent in
the oppression of these frightful days. She said that it was hers, too.

After that letter of hers, at the outbreak of the war, in which she had
said that she thanked God for him that he had delayed her decision to
unchain their chains and to join their lives, no further reference had
been made by either to that near touch of desire's wand. It was, as he
had said it should be, as though her letter had never been written. And
in her letters she always mentioned Tony. She wrote to Tony every day,
she told him; and there were few of her letters but mentioned a parcel
of some kind sent to her husband. Tony never wrote. Sometimes, she said,
there came a scrap from him relative to some business matter she must
see to; but never any response to her daily budget of gossip--"the kind
of news I know he likes to hear"--or any news of himself and his doings.

She once or twice said, without any comment, "But he is writing often to
Mrs. Stanley and Lady Grace Heddon and Sophie Basildon and I hear bits
of him from them and know he is keeping well. Of course, I pretend to
them that their news is stale to me." Another time, "I've just finished
my budget to Tony," she wrote, "and have sent him two sets of those
patent rubber soles for his boots. Do you think he can get them put on?
Every day I try to think of some new trifle he'd like; and you'd be
shocked, and think I care nothing about the war, at the number of
theatres I make time to go to. You see, it makes something bright and
amusing to tell him, describing the plays. I feel most frightfully that,
although of course my canteen work is useful, the real best thing every
woman can do in this frightful time is to do all she can for her man out
there; and Tony's mine. When this is all over--oh, Marko, is it ever
going to be over?--things will hurt again; but while he's out there the
old things are dead and Tony's mine and England's--my man for England:
that is my tho