She got her breath a little, and stopped shivering, and looked at him. He had not changed much; one does not in fifteen months. It was the same eager, dark young face, almost too sharply cut for a young man's, with very bright dark eyes. The principal difference was in his expression. Before he went he had had a great deal of expression, a face that showed almost too much of what he thought. That was gone. His face was younger-looking, because the flashing of changes over it was gone. He looked wondering, very tired, and dulled somehow. And he spoke without the turns of speech that she and her friends amused each other with, the little quaintnesses of conscious fancy. "As if he'd been talking to children," she thought. Then she remembered that it was not that. He had been giving orders, and taking them, and being on firing-lines; all the things that he had written her about, and that had seemed so like story-books when she got the letters. His being so changed made it real for the first time. . . . And then an unworthy feeling--as if she simply could not face the romantic and tender eyes of all the office--everybody having the same feelings about her that Miss Kaplan had, even if they were well-bred enough to phrase them politely. "Shall we go?" she asked abruptly, while this feeling was strong in her. "Not for a minute. I want to see the place where my wife has spent her last year . . ." He stood with his arm still around her--would he never stop touching her?--and surveyed the office with the same sort of affectionate amusement he might have given to a workbasket of hers, or a piece of embroidery. Marjorie slipped from under his arm and put her hat on. "I'm ready now," she said. They walked out of the little office, and through the long aisle down the center of the floor of the office-building, Marjorie, still miserably conscious of the eyes, and the emotions behind the eyes, and quite as conscious that they were emotions that she ought to be ashamed of minding. "Now where shall we go for luncheon?" demanded Francis joyously, as they got outside. He caught her hand in his surreptitiously and said "You darling!" under his breath. For a minute the old magic of his swift courtship came back to her, and she forgot the miserable oppression of facing fifty years of wedded life with a stranger; and she smiled up at him. Then, as he caught her hand in his, quite undisguisedly this time, and held it under his arm, the repulsion came back. "Anywhere you like," she answered his question. "We'll go to the biggest, wildest, wooliest place in the city, where the band plays the most music," he announced. "Going to celebrate. Come on, honey. And then I have a fine surprise for you, as soon as we go back to the flat. Lucille won't be back till five, will she? And thank goodness for that!"