Sara Lee stood up and tried to smile.
"Please don't worry about me," she said. "I need something to do, that's
all. You see, I've been worrying for so long. If I can get to work and
try to make up I'll not be so hopeless. But I am not quite hopeless,
either," she added hastily. It was as though by the very word she had
consigned Henri to death. "You see, I am like the men; I won't give him
up. And perhaps some night he will come across from the other side, out
of the dark."
Mr. Travers took her back to the hotel. When he returned from paying
off the taxi he found her looking across at the square.
"Do you remember," she asked him, "the time when the little donkey was
hurt over there?"
"I shall never forget it."
"And the young officer who ran out when I did, and shot the poor thing?"
Mr. Travers remembered.
"That was he--the man we have been speaking of."
For the first time that day her eyes filled with tears.
Sara Lee, at twenty, was already living in her memories.
So again the lights went down in front, and the back drop became but a
veil, and invisible. And to Sara Lee there came back again some of the
characters of the early mise en scene--marching men, forage wagons,
squadrons of French cavalry escorting various staffs, commandeered farm
horses with shaggy fetlocks fastened in rope corrals, artillery rumbling
along rutted roads which shook the gunners almost off the limbers.
Nothing was changed--and everything. There was no Rene to smile his
adoring smile, but Marie came out, sobbing and laughing, and threw
herself into the girl's arms. The little house was the same, save for
a hole in the kitchen wall. There were the great piles of white bowls
and the shining kettles. There was the corner of her room, patched by
Rene's hands, now so long quiet. A few more shell holes in the street,
many more little crosses in the field near the poplar trees, more Allied
aeroplanes in the air--that was all that was changed.
But to Sara Lee everything was changed, for all that. The little house
was grave and still, like a house of the dead. Once it had echoed to
young laughter, had resounded to the noise and excitement of Henri's
every entrance. Even when he was not there it was as though it but
waited for him to stir it into life, and small echoes of his gayety had
seemed to cling to its old walls.