“Perhaps it’s wrong of me,” she said. “But it makes me so sad. And I can do nothing.” “Abner is your second?” suggested Miss Tolley.!

“But now I’m thirty-five; and I couldn’t love you if I tried.” She shook her curls at him. “It isn’t your fault. It is that I have changed. Suppose I’d married you?” He looked at her sharply across the corner of the desk.

Her conscience plagued her when she thought of Mrs. Denton. For some time now, they had been very close together; and the old lady had come to depend upon her. She waited till all doubt was ended before calling to say good-bye. Mrs. Denton was seated before an old bureau that had long stood locked in a corner of the library. The drawers were open and books and papers were scattered about. Joan remembered Folk, the artist she had met at Flossie’s party, who had promised to walk with her on the terrace at St. Germain, and tell her more about her mother. She looked up his address on her return home, and wrote to him, giving him the name of the hotel in the Rue de Grenelle where Mrs. Denton had arranged that she should stay. She found a note from him awaiting her when she arrived there. He thought she would like to be quiet after her journey. He would call round in the morning. He had presumed on the privilege of age to send her some lilies. They had been her mother’s favourite flower. “Monsieur Folk, the great artist,” had brought them himself, and placed them in her dressing-room, so Madame informed her. There was but one other woman at the hospital. It had been a farmhouse. The man and both sons had been killed during the first year of the war, and the woman had asked to be allowed to stay on. Her name was Madame Lelanne. She was useful by reason of her great physical strength. She could take up a man as he lay and carry him on her outstretched arms. It was an expressionless face, with dull, slow-moving eyes that never changed. She and Joan shared a small grenier in one of the barns. Joan had brought with her a camp bedstead; but the woman, wrapping a blanket round her, would creep into a hole she had made for herself among the hay. She never took off her clothes, except the great wooden-soled boots, so far as Joan could discover.