"Oh yes! I write home every Christmas. Just a line that I am well and happy. Occasionally I pick up notes of them in the St. Louis newspapers. I keep them pretty well under glass. It's all so dreamlike--I've always been obsessed with that consciousness. How faint can be the line between the dream and reality." He drew her toward him by the hands, their faces lit, quivering, close. "Lilly, Lilly, let us not stop just short of happiness." "All my life I have done that." "I cannot put you out of my heart now that I have put you in." "No. No. No." But his embrace had already shaped itself, and, springing back from it and her own singing of the flesh, she crowded up against the wistaria-painted screen, shielding it. "How dared you--here--in this--room! With her!" "Lilly!" "Go, please! Go, please!" "You mean that?" "You know I do." He bent low in the attitude of kissing her hand, but without touching it. "Forget everything I've said, Lilly, and forgive. We'll go back to the old. Good night, Lilly! Mrs. Penny." He must have departed on the balls of his feet, because presently through the roaring of the silence she heard the door slam without having been conscious of his passage down the hallway; and then, after a second, Harry Calvert tiptoeing to her open door to look in with his light-blue eyes. She sprang forward, throwing herself against the door as she locked it. "Don't," she cried through it--"don't you ever dare do that again, Harry! Walk on your heels. You frighten me when you sneak like that--you--you--frighten--me." Then she undressed, crying, tears rolling down to her high white chest and finally on to the crispiness of her plain nightgown. Crept to bed finally, into a darkness as sleek as a black cat's flank, silently, to save the sag of mattress, her body curving to the curve of her child's. Once from the inky pool of that long night Zoe's hand crept up, finding out her mother's cheek. "Lilly," floating up for a drowsy second to the surface of consciousness--"Lilly--you're crying. Are--you sad--again?" "Yes, Zoe--terribly--terribly--" CHAPTER III The year that Zoe entered High School, 1914, out of an international sky of fairly pellucid blue, the thunderclap of world war burst in fury. It was strange, though, even after the subsequent plunge of her country to the Allied flank, and the menacing and shifting tides of affairs creeping closer and closer to the edge of everyday life, how little the complexion of Lilly's routine was changed. True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze. The evening after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, she attended a mass meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump in her throat.