him, so that he could have her. * * * * * He was very much real Georges that day. He lay in bed until hunger forced him to rise, and then would neither dress nor shave. He was not of that type that lives on the interest of the past, nor hurriedly discounts the future. Nor can it be said that the thought of Lieutenant Skene crossed Madeleine’s mind. Had it done so, she might have reflected how much more she loved this, her spoiled child, than that, her good one. But she, too, was absorbed in the present. She did not even remember the Ministry, whose service she had so peremptorily abandoned. When the first gladness of reunion was slowing down into the assurance that she really had got him back, and had now only to devise how to keep him--a task she did not feel very difficult--she began to question him, very gently and indirectly, as to his plans. She remonstrated with him on the folly of their being there together, an object of interest to the concierge, still more on his insistence that she should stay there. But he only shouted that he would “burst up” all the concierges, and she had to humor him and promise to stay for the present at least. Not that he threatened to leave her, but that she would not and could not threaten to leave him. At length, in the evening, as he sat in gown and slippers before the fire she had made, at the supper she had fetched and set, while she tidied the room strewn with his things, he began to think of her, asked for her father. He only asked one or two brief questions not being the man to take deep interest in anything outside his own comfort. When she had answered, he just said: “This sacred war!” Nothing else. But Madeleine knew what he meant. There it was, all round and over them, enveloping, threatening, thwarting. No less than he, she rebelled against it, in her decorous woman’s way. But for him she rebelled against it twice over, hated it, made it responsible for his loss of health that was new, and his violence that was habitual--forgave him, on account of it, his carelessness of her--this way in which he wanted to live--the obvious fact that he had had other women in this room. She did not reflect upon her own record, then. But she coaxed him to take supper--she had bought the war-products that were nearest to the hare pâté and spicebread and confiture of old times--gave him a bowl of hot wine and water, as she had many a time that he had found her, he, glowing and triumphant, with a dog at his heels. And sure enough, under the spell of her magic, in that firelit bed-sitting room of the little flat in Paris, there came back, gradually but surely, the Georges of old days. His worn cheeks filled out, his eyes were less sunken, his hand less thin and shaky. He began to hold up his head and hum a tune. She hung near him, watching him, foreseeing not only every need, but every whim. He became almost liberal, expansive. He had fourteen days’