Joan dined at a popular restaurant that evening. She fancied it might cheer her up. But the noisy patriotism of the over-fed crowd only irritated her. These elderly, flabby men, these fleshy women, who would form the spectators, who would loll on their cushioned seats protected from the sun, munching contentedly from their well-provided baskets while listening to the dying groans rising upwards from the drenched arena. She glanced from one podgy thumb to another and a feeling of nausea crept over her. “You can ask that,” he said: “you, a soldier? Does the soldier say: ‘I am of no use. I am but a poor man of no account. Who has need of such as I?’ God has need of all. There is none that shall not help to win the victory. It is with his life the soldier serves. Who were they whose teaching moved the world more than it has ever yet been moved by the teaching of the wisest? They were men of little knowledge, of but little learning, poor and lowly. It was with their lives they taught.”!

She had not told him of the Phillips episode. But she felt instinctively that he knew. It was always a little mysterious to her, his perception in matters pertaining to herself. “I might,” he answered, “if I had known the value of it. I found a cable waiting for me in New York. My father had been dead a month; and I had to return immediately.”

“Why didn’t they want them?” she asked. “I shouldn’t have recognized you,” laughed Joan. “What was the occasion?” He raised his eyes to hers. The shadow that, to her fancy, had always rested there seemed to have departed. A light had come to them.