the officers of her company, and the view of those poppy-covered hills from the windows. And the main figure in that dining-room, always from her very first day, when her interest in him was only potential, was Captain Rand Bellamy.

She had always realized that he stood somewhat between her and the rest, a rather rough, though well-meaning, group of men whose lack of refinement was apt to go beyond a systematic murdering of the king's English. Good line officers, good fighters, they had played their creditable part in a regiment whose own part in the making of history would always be a just source of pride. But they had forgotten, these officers, what it was to have women around. Dorothy soon realized that it was Captain Bellamy who never forgot or allowed the others to forget. But in the welter of emotions through which her own feeling for this man ran like a vividly colored thread came the grateful memory of the youngest second lieutenant, a mere boy, and his impulsive words after she had been there a few weeks.

"Great Scott!" he exclaimed one day, "the morale of this outfit sure has jumped some since you struck this Godforsaken burg!"

Particularly Dorothy loved the times when, at the end of a hearty army supper, the men would push their chairs back from the table, tilt them against the wall, light their cigarettes, and, as they called it, "fight the war." She would sit there quietly, a perfectly contented listener.

By and by she would slip out and down to the big room over the familiar German Wirtschaft, or café, which she felt a real pride in making as attractive a club-room as she could. And all evening long she might sit at the piano and play, "Just a Baby's Prayer at Twilight," "I'm Sorry I Made You Cry," and other soldier favorites as an accompaniment for a score of sentimentally lusty voices.

And how disgusted they were because she always picked the days to eat with them when the principal item on the menu was either slum, the despised, or

the doubly despised "corn bill." They were wonderful boys, those enlisted friends of hers, and her heart would always warm at the thought of them.

But this other friend of hers, this lover -how, how had it all happened? He had little in common with those other officers except having faced death with them; and, after all, when there was no longer death to face, that did not furnish an inexhaustible topic of conversation.

But she and he, liking the same things, books, music, to look on people and on life, to reflect on all its vagaries, both sensitive to atmosphere, and both lonely in this new atmosphere so different from all they had ever known-she and he had grown to care, and finally one memorable night to confess it.

Somehow, when that time came, it did not matter that he was married. She felt all the rush of emotion toward him that she would have felt toward a man she could marry. At home the old inhibitions might have held; over there everything was different. The same things were not even right.

But she had gone away, so that there could be nothing to regret except the ache in her heart that wanted what it could not have. She was glad she was home once more, where her imagination would not again become aflame with thoughts she once would never have believed she could have known.

Afterward, when Dorothy looked back on her first month at home, it seemed to her she did nothing but answer questions. At first she did not mind such definite attacks as: "Was everybody always perfectly nice to you, or did you really have any horrid experiences?" or, "Were the soldiers really crazy about the French girls?" or, "How did they get along with the Germans? Did they fraternize much with the Dutch Fräuleins?"

But the women drove her nearly distracted who said easily: "Now tell me all about your great experiences, dear. What was it really like over there?"

"As if any one could tell what it was like!" she stormed one day to her mother when she had been particularly tongue-tied before a flood of such demands. "Don't you ask any more women in to have tea and then show me

off. If you do, I'll tell them the soldiers drank themselves drunk and swore with every breath and cursed me when the chocolate was n't hot or the doughnuts were leathery, and-and-oh, I don't know what I won't tell them!"

"Dorothy," Mrs. Painter said sharply, "you 're acting absurdly."

But Dorothy was following this idea with growing enthusiasm.

"Just imagine what a sensation it would create if I were to say when some one asked me, 'But did n't you find the soldiers very inclined to be sentimental?' 'Oh, mercy! yes. I had twenty-nine proposals the first two months I was over there, eleven officers and eighteen enlisted men, and after that I did n't keep track.' Would n't that give them their money's worth?"

Mrs. Painter was not smiling.

"Dorothy dear, what makes you act so queer? I don't mean just this, I mean-are you happy? What is it? Tell mother."

The light faded from Dorothy's face. She looked suddenly miserable.

"I-I can't. You would n't understand."

"Why would n't I?"

"You 've been too sheltered." She spoke with absurdly solemn conviction.

"Oh. my dear!" Mrs. Painter reached for her daughter with protecting

arms.

Her mother's arms around her broke Dorothy's self-control. She began to cry, not quietly, but with great shaking sobs.

"Oh, I wish you 'd never, never gone!" The passionate agony of her mother's voice checked Dorothy's sobbing. "Listen, mother dear. You must n't ever say that. I would n't have missed going across for anything in the world. I 've learned so much I never would have known, and everything I 've learned I'll be better for when I get over being quite so near it as I am now."

Her mother looked down at the moist face against her shoulder.

"What have you learned, Dorothy?" "Oh, so many things! I know what the truest kind of being a comrade to a man is; I know it does n't matter if they don't use good English; I know swearing may be nothing more than a habit.

Often they have n't the slightest curse in their hearts. And as for drinking and— things like that, well, you can't always judge them. You don't know how many times they have n't got drunk-or done other things." She sat up now and looked steadily at her mother. "A year ago I would have drawn my skirts around me and passed by on the other side. I'll never do that again— in my judgments, I mean. Things are n't just black or white, are they?"

Mrs. Painter shook her head.

"Can we go back now to why you are n't happy?" she said. "Can't you tell me? I have n't misunderstood yet, have I?"

Dorothy got up and walked to the other side of the room and stopped in front of a picture of the cathedral at Rheims in the days of its splendor. But she saw neither that nor the devastated city Rheims now was. She turned and went into her room, and came back with a large picture. On it was written, "Dorothy from Rand." Mrs. Painter studied the picture in silence, with Dorothy looking over her shoulder.

"It's the captain you wrote about. He has a fine face. And you 're in love with him?"

"Yes; he 's married."

"You wrote me."

Dorothy took the picture from her mother's hands and looked intently at it.

"What would you think if I told you that at the end I did n't care if he was married that did n't make any difference?"

"Of course it always makes a difference eventually," Mrs. Painter answered carefully.

"It makes no difference now," was Dorothy's vehement reply.

"It makes this much difference you can't marry him," her mother said practically. She hesitated. "Then you don't care for Kenneth at all any more?"

Dorothy put the picture down.

"Oh, yes; but not that way. He 's dear and all that, but he does n't thrill me."

"And this other man does. Of course it is necessary to be thrilled?"

"Well, is n't it?" Dorothy flung Dorothy flung

back. "Thrill is n't the right word; I know that as well as you. It 's much too trivial. We're off the subject, anyway; but at least you know what's the matter with me. And I'm not over it by a good deal-not even the maddest impulses."

"It's a little soon to be over it, perhaps," Mrs. Painter suggested.

"Oh, you think it will all fade perfectly naturally and simply," Dorothy stormed. "You don't know what I felt. I tell you, some of us over there who were lonely and human, and in the midst of literally hundreds of attractive men who were lonely and human, too, know what it means to be virtuous. So many conventions were gone, there was so little to save you from the things you felt! It's easy enough to sit here and judge. I tell you, you don't know. No one knows who did n't go through it. Any one can be good safe at home, in her own family, when she 's not tempted, and no one knows what any one else's temptations are. Things are n't just black or white," she repeated again.

Her mother was silent, looking at her with a strange look. Dorothy laughed a little, though not with much mirth.

"Now I suppose you are sorry I went over there. But I'm not; I'm glad. I got through my cotton-batting wrappings to life. And yet, when it comes to a show-down, I can hold up my head and look any one in the eyes; yes, any one."

She picked up the picture, looked at it fiercely, then carried it back to her room. In September Dorothy's division came home. In the crowds at the wharf she managed somehow to locate G Company. For one moment she saw Rand. He had gripped her hand hard. He was not going to be able to come to see her, after all, as the division was entraining immediately for Camp

"I'll write when we get there," he said. After the first long glance, he kept looking over and beyond her as he spoke, calling to a sergeant here and there, issuing directions, his mind obviously centered on the task ahead. Dorothy left him in a minute with another hand-clasp, and passed along the line to speak to all the others she knew. She had a strangely cheated sensation, of not having found what she expected.

Camp was a long way from New York, but it was worse than nothing to see any one like that.

Rand's letter came in less than a week. It was not a love-letter, yet it affected her more strongly than if it had been. It somehow effaced the memory of those unsatisfactory minutes at the wharf; for underneath what he actually said, she felt the current of the things he had kept himself from saying, and she went to her bureau-drawer, took out his picture, and looked at it a long time, with memories so vivid that they made her heart ache. Gradually, as she looked, she fancied his. eyes began to change color and to look. at her with that luminous intensity that moved her indescribably.

Winter slipped on into spring, and life became so normal again that Dorothy could sometimes visualize it going placidly on in that way forever. But when May came, two things happened to break this calm. Kenneth was offered a chance to go to the Orient for his firm, to be gone from six months to a year. He was to start the end of June.

Dorothy heard this in dismay dismay that deepened the more she thought about it.

It was a mild Sunday afternoon, and they had gone down to Long Island to spend the day at Kenneth's tiny bungalow, cook their own dinner, go canoeing, or just lie in the sand and get sunburned. They were getting sunburned when Kenneth told her.

"Mercy!" she exclaimed, sitting up very straight, "that 's an awfully long time to be gone!"

He began systematically to bury the hand of hers that was nearest him.

"Yes, it's a long time," he answered. "In fact, it's too long a time to go away and leave you."

Dorothy stiffened, at which Kenneth patted the sand reassuringly.

"I'd ask you to go with me; only I don't think you'd do it." Dorothy moved slightly. "I have n't said anything before because I 've been trying to get acquainted with you again. You 're a lot maturer person than you were two years ago, but you 're not quite so lovable. It 's kind of as if you'd had to develop a protective shell once, and now, though you don't need it so much,

it's still there, and the rest of us keep bumping into it."

Dorothy meditated on this.

"I don't like not to be so lovable," she complained finally.

Kenneth laughed a little grimly. "Don't worry about it any. You 're as lovable now as it 's lawful for any girl to be."

Dorothy unearthed her hand and turned her head away.

"Look at me, Dorothy. I know you don't love me. Do you know how I know it? Because you 're so deathly afraid all the time that I'm going to touch you. Once your eyes looked different. They said that if I had patience, your lips were going to be for me. I don't know whom you are keeping them for now; I only know it is n't I."

Dorothy's face had been turned away; now she turned it back.

"I do care about you, Ken," she said huskily; "only everything is so mixed for me. Less than a year ago I felt about a man as I never felt about any one in my life. He was married. I got so I did n't care. I just had sense enough to go away. But I had the most dreadful feelings-oh, I can't tell you!"

"You don't have to. I know all about them. I 've had them myself." He thought a minute, then said, "How much do you still feel that way?"

"Oh, I don't know. I can't remember things as I did, and I don't really feellawless any more; but maybe if I saw him I'll never know unless I see him." "I see. You think the volcano 's only smoldering." He got to his feet, then reached down his hands to her. "Let's go back."

They walked along slowly, sinking in the sand with every step.

"I thought you 'd disapprove of me," Dorothy said and sighed.

"Of you? No, not of you."
Dorothy was quickly on the defensive.
"You mean you do disapprove of him?"
"I don't mean anything."

"Yes, you do. What do you mean? Tell me."

He frowned, then spoke doggedly. "I don't know anything about things like that, Dorothy; but if you 're really crazy for my opinion, I can't quite see that kind of thing."