Part 62 (2/2)

For just one moment her anger blazed, then she laughed with something of toleration.

”Oh, you'd never understand if I talked a year. So what's the use of wasting breath?”

She said ”Good-bye” after that, and Jean watched her go, hearing the padded steps--until the front door shut and there was silence.

After that, with almost a sense of panic, she sped through the empty rooms, finding the papers after a frantic search, and gaining the street with a sense of escape.

Yet even then, it was sometime before her heart beat normally, and always after that when she thought of Hilda, it was against the chill and gloom of the empty house, with that look upon her face of dark resentment.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SINGING WOMAN

Somewhere in France, Drusilla had found the Captain. Or, rather, he had found her. He had come upon her one rainy afternoon, and had not recognized her in her muddy uniform, with a strap under her chin. Then all at once he had heard her voice, crooning a song to a badly wounded boy whose head lay in her lap.

The Captain had stopped in his tracks. ”Drusilla--”

The light in her eyes gave him his welcome, but she waved him away.

The boy died in her arms. When she joined her lover, she was much moved. ”It is not my work to look after the wounded; I carry blankets and things to refugees. But now and then--it happens. A sh.e.l.l burst in the street, and that poor lad--! He asked me to sing for him--you see, I have been singing for them as they go through, and he remembered--”

He was holding both of her hands in his. ”Dear woman, dear woman--”

There were people all about them, but there were no conventions in war times, and n.o.body cared if he held her hands.

Her face was dirty, her hair wind-blown. She was muddy and without a trace of the smartness for which she had been famous. She was simply a hard-worked woman in clothes of masculine cut, yet never had she seemed so beautiful to her lover. He bent and kissed her in the market-place.

He was an undemonstrative Englishman, but there was that in her eyes which carried him away from self-consciousness.

”I saw McKenzie in Paris,” he said. ”He told me that you were here.”

”We came over together. Did you get my letter?”

”I have had no letters. But now that I have you, nothing matters.”

”Really? Somehow I don't feel that I deserve it.”

”Deserve what?”

”All that you are giving me. But I have liked to think of it. It has been a prop to lean on--”

”Only that--?”

”A s.h.i.+eld and a buckler, dearest, a cross held high--” Her breath came quickly.

They sat side by side on the worn doorstep of a shattered building and talked.

<script>