In the next room he could hear her going quietly about, opening and
closing the drawers of the new bureau, moving a chair. Pretty soon, God
willing, they need never be separated. He would have her always, to
protect and cherish and love.
He went outside to her closed door.
"Good night, sweetheart," he called softly.
"Good night, dear," came her soft reply.
But long after he was asleep Sara Lee stood at her window and listened
to the leaves, so like the feet of weary men on the ruined street over
there.
For the first time she was questioning the thing she had done. She
loved Harvey--but there were many kinds of love. There was the love of
Jean for Henri, and there was the wonderful love, though the memory now
was cruel and hurt her, of Henri for herself. And there was the love of
Marie for the memory of Maurice the spy. Many kinds of love; and one
heart might love many people, in different ways.
A small doubt crept into her mind. This feeling she had for Harvey was
not what she had thought it was over there. It was a thing that had
belonged to a certain phase of her life. But that phase was over. It
was, like Marie's, but a memory.
This Harvey of the new car and the increased income and the occasional
hardness in his voice was not the Harvey she had left. Or perhaps it
was she who had changed. She wondered. She felt precisely the same,
tender toward her friends, unwilling to hurt them. She did not want
to hurt Harvey.
But she did not love him as he deserved to be loved. And she had a
momentary lift of the veil, when she saw the long vista of the years,
the two of them always together and always between them hidden,
untouched, but eating like a cancer, Harvey's resentment and suspicion
of her months away from him.
There would always be a barrier between them. Not only on Harvey's side.
There were things she had no right to tell--of Henri, of his love and
care for her, and of that last terrible day when he realized what he had
done.
That night, lying in the new bed, she faced that situation too. How
much was she to blame? If Henri felt that each life lost was lost by
him wasn't the same true for her? Why had she allowed him to stay in
London?
But that was one question she did not answer frankly.
She lay there in the darkness and wondered what punishment he would
receive. He had done so much for them over there. Surely, surely, they
would allow for that. But small things came back to her--the awful
sight of the miller and his son, led away to death, with the sacks over
their heads. The relentlessness of it all, the expecting that men
should give everything, even life itself, and ask for no mercy.