“I watched,” she answered, quietly. And yet this, he knew, was before that night on the trail. This was still in the confidence of her supreme confession: “I didn’t know no woman I could tell—nor no other decent man.” And she had watched for him.... But, after all, she was telling him so _now_! And here, to-night, when she no longer had need of him, her comradeship was unchanged. And there had been those hours on the train from Chicago.... “You watched!” he repeated. “Oh look here! Would you watch—now?” To her voice came that tremor that he remembered, which seemed to be in the very words themselves. “I watched all day to-day,” she said. Even then he did not touch her. It was as if there were some gulf which she must be the one to cross. “Oh Lory, Lory!” he cried. And she understood, and it was she who stretched out her hands to him. In their broken talk, he told her of his father, and she clung to him with a cry that she had not been with him. “I couldn’t send for you,” she said. “I thought—maybe you was glad Bunchy come. I thought maybe you was glad I was off your hands—” “My hands,” he said, “just was huntin’ for your hands.” “Then that ice-cream place’s wife,” she said, “told me about to-night—and somebody told Aunt ’Cretia. And we come here to the meeting—but when I saw you, I run and lost ’em—” “I wanted you when I was in that meeting,” he told her, “more’n any other time, most. I knew you knew what they meant.” She said the thing which in the tense feeling of that hour, had remained for her paramount. “That woman,” she cried, “with her baby in her shawl! _Think_—when she knew it was gone—and she couldn’t go back....” “I thought—what if it had been you,” he told her. She was in his arms, close in the dusk of a great cedar. “Any woman—any woman!” she said, and he felt her sobbing. He turned and looked away at the people. Not far from them, like murals on the night, went the people, that little lighted stream of people, down the white steps and along the gray drives. He looked at the women. That about the baby in the shawl might have happened to any one of them, if war were here.... It was terrible to think that this might happen to any one of these women. He felt as if he knew them. And then too, there must be some of them whose fathers had died.... He kept looking at the people, and in his arms was Lory, sobbing for that woman who had lost her child from her shawl; and over there across the water were thousands whose children were gone, whose fathers had died.... Here they all seemed so kindly, and they were going home ... to homes such as he and Lory were going to have. _Just the same—just the same_....