After he had gone, looking boyish and reluctant, she would lie for a
little while watching the door. Perhaps he had forgotten something, and
would come back! One day he did, and was surprised to find her suddenly
in tears.
"You came back!" she said half hysterically. "You came back."
That was the only time in all those weeks that he kissed her. The nurse
had gone out, and suddenly he caught her in his arms and held her to
him. He put her back very gently, and she saw that he was pale.
"I think I'd better go now, and not come back," he said.
And for two long and endless days he did not come. Then on the third
he came, very stiff and formal, and with himself well in hand. Audrey,
leaning back and watching him, felt what a boy he was after all, so
determined to do the right thing, so obvious with his blue-prints, and
so self-conscious.
In June she left the hospital and went to the country. She had already
made a little market for her work, and she wanted to carry it on. By
that time, too, she knew that the break must come between Clayton and
herself if it came at all.
"No letters, no anything, Clay," she said, and he acquiesced quietly.
But the night she left, the butler, coming downstairs to investigate a
suspicious sound, found him restlessly pacing the library floor.
In August he went abroad, and some time about the middle of the month
while he was in London, he received a cable from Graham. He had been
commissioned a first lieutenant in the infantry. Clayton had been seeing
war at first hand then, and for a few moments he was fairly terrified.
On that first of August the Germans had used liquid fire for the first
time, thus adding a new horror. Men in the trenches swept by it had been
practically annihilated. Attacks against it were practically suicide.
Already the year had seen the last of Kitchener's army practically
destroyed, and the British combing the country for new divisions.
In the deadly give and take of that summer, where gains and losses were
measured by yards, the advantage was steadily on the German side, and
it would be a year before the small force of American regulars could be
augmented to any degree by the great new army. It was the darkest hour.
Following on the heels of Graham's cable came a hysterical one from
Natalie.
"Graham probably ordered abroad. Implore you use influence with
Washington."