And then, one morning, just two months from the day he had left, Corey arrived unexpectedly by the ten-fifty train. Mr. Ewing, passing the house on his way home that evening, had been surprised to see Corey, in his shirt-sleeves, trimming shrubs in the garden. And he had stopped to welcome him back, and they had talked about the war in quite the old way, so that from that evening on it was exactly the same as it had been before Corey had gone to his convention in Philadelphia. It appears that all this time a very natural intimacy was growing up between these two, gentle old Mr. Ewing and Corey. And I can imagine that Corey, who became, as it were, the instantaneous friend of every one, had made in his life very few actual contacts, few, if any, real and intimate friendships. And perhaps that was why this friendship, based as it was on such small outward manifestations as talking over the news in the daily papers together, had prospered. Then, too, there was the relationship, distant enough to be free of demands. Corey had returned from the Philadelphia trip the last week in October. It was on a Sunday afternoon near the middle of December that Mr. Ewing, sitting reading his weekly illustrated paper, looked up to see through the window Corey coming quickly along the walk. Mr. Ewing was struck by something peculiar in his friend’s appearance, something hurried in the set of his hat and overcoat, yet as if he himself were entirely unconscious of haste. He turned in at the gate, and Mr. Ewing got up and opened the door. Corey came through it, Mr. Ewing said, as if escaping from something outside, something of which he was physically afraid. He almost pushed past Mr. Ewing and into the room, and with scarcely a glance to make sure they were alone, he spoke, and his voice was strained like a note on a too taut violin string: “She’s found it! _This_—where I’d had it hid!” He held extended in his open hand, as if there were no longer any reason for concealing it from any one, what appeared to Mr. Ewing’s bewildered eyes to be a bit of ribbon, striped green and red, and a bit of bronze metal attached. “What is it?” he asked, stupefied by the completeness of the change that had come upon the man before him. “It’s the _Croix_!” Corey’s voice was impatient, “The _Croix de Guerre_!” Mr. Ewing stared at the bright-colored thing, trying to comprehend. Corey still held it outstretched in his hand, and the bronze Maltese cross with its crossed swords slipped through his fingers and hung down. Corey’s voice was going on. Mr. Ewing had missed something. “... So now she knows,” was the end of what he heard—and in that instant his eye caught the words engraved on the cross, _République Française_, and the full meaning of its being there in Corey’s hand burst suddenly upon him. The new French decoration! The _Croix de Guerre_! “You’ve _been_ there?” he managed to say. “You’ve been over there?”