moment of Edward Cary’s appearance on the stair, that gown and lights were justified. He was a man eminently good to look at. Louis Gaillard, it appeared, knew how to dress; at any rate, the apparel that Edward wore to-night became him so well that it was at once forgotten. He was clean-shaven, and Simon had much shortened the sunburnt hair. Down the stair and across hall and drawing-room he came to her side. “Did you ever get through the thorny wood and the briar hedge in the fairy story? That’s what, without any doubt, I have done!” Désirée smiled, and the room seemed to fill with soft rose and golden lights. “_I_ don’t call it a thorny wood and a briar hedge. I always see a moat with a draw-bridge that you have to catch just at the right moment, or not at all—” At table they talked of this or that—which is to say that they talked of War. War had gripped their land so closely and so long; War had harried their every field; War had marked their every door—all their world, when it talked of this and that, talked only of some expression on some one of War’s many faces. It might be wildly gay, the talk, or simple and sad, or brief and grave, with tragic brows, or bitterer than myrrh, or curiously humorous, or sardonic, or angry, or ironic, or infinitely touching, or with flashing eyes, or with a hand that wiped the drop away; but always the usual, customary talk into which folk fell was merely War. So Désirée and Edward talked War while they ate the delicate, frugal supper. But when it was eaten, and he followed her back into the drawing-room, they sat on either side the hearth, the leaping red and topaz flame between them lighting each face, and little by little forgot to talk of this and that.