"We all love comfort," he replied. "Some of us are franker than others about it." She made a little grimace. "Comfort! It is my own word, but what a word! It is luxury I worship--luxury--and a friend. Is that, perhaps, another word too slight, eh?" He met the provocative gleam of her eyes with a smile of amusement. "You are just the same child, Sonia," he remarked. "Neither climate nor country, nor the few passing years, can change you." "It is you who have grown older and sterner," she pouted. "It is you who have lost the gift of living to-day as though to-morrow were not. There was a time, was there not, John, when you did not care to sit always so far away?" She laid her hand--ringless, over-manicured, but delicately white---- upon his. He smoothed it gently. "You see, Sonia," he sighed, "troubles have come that harden the hearts even of the gayest of us." She frowned. "You are not going to remind me--" she began. "If I reminded you of anything, Sonia," he interrupted, "I would remind you that you are a Frenchwoman." She stretched out her hand restlessly and took one of the Russian cigarettes from a bowl by her side. "You are not, by any chance, going to talk seriously, dear John?" "I am," he assured her, "very seriously." "Oh, la, la!" she laughed. "You, my dear, gay companion, you who have shaken the bells all your life, you are going to talk seriously! And to-night, when we meet again after so long. Ah, well, why should I be surprised?" she went on, with a pout. "You have changed. When one looks into your face, one sees the difference. But to me, of all people in the world! Why talk seriously to me! I am just Sonia, the gipsy nightingale. I know nothing of serious things." "You carry one very serious secret in your heart," he told her gravely, "one little pain which must sometimes stab you. You are a Frenchwoman, and yet--" Lutchester paused for a moment. Sonia, too, seemed suddenly to have awakened into a state of tense and vivid emotion. The cigarette burned away between her fingers. Her great eyes were fixed upon Lutchester. There was something almost like fear in their questioning depths. "Finish! Finish!" she insisted. "Continue!" "And yet," he went on, "your very dear friend, the friend for whose sake you are here in America, is your country's enemy." She raised herself a little upon the couch. "That is not true," she declared furiously. "Maurice loves France. His heart aches for the misery that has come upon her. It is your country only which he hates. If France had but possessed the courage to stand by herself, to resist when England forced her friendship upon her, none of this tragedy would ever have happened. Maurice has told me so himself. France could have peace today, peace at her own price." "There is no peace which would leave France with a soul, save the peace which follows victory," Lutchester replied sternly. She crushed her cigarette nervously in her fingers, threw it away, and lit another.