In the Grecian simplicity of her nightgown, the very cream of silk, she might have been Andromache harnessing Hector. Only there was no baby for him to leave with her, no baby to shrink in fright from the horsehair crest of the helmet that he did not wear. When he was all dressed in his olive-drab she still could not let him go. She held him with her soft arms and twiddled the gun-metal buttons of his blouse. And when at length she must make an end of farewells she hugged him with all her might and was glad that the hard buttons hurt the delicate breast that he felt against him smotheringly sweet and perilously yielding. Not knowing how tame the event of all this war-like circumstance was to prove, he suffered to the deeps of his being the keen ache of separation that has wrung so many hearts in this eternally battling world. War, the sunderer, had reached them with his great divorce. When he was free of her at last she followed him and caught new kisses. She ran shamelessly barefoot to the door to have the last of his lips, called good-by to him when the elevator carried him into the pit, and flung kisses downward after him. Then she stumbled back to her room and cried aloud. Liliane, her maid, came to help her and Liliane wept with her, knowing all too well what war could do to love. Later Kedzie went to the armory and slipped through the massed crowds to see Jim again. He was gloriously busy and it stirred her martially to see his men come up, click heels, salute, report, ask questions, salute, and retreat again. A few excited days of recruiting and equipping and then the ceremony of the muster-in. Jim spent his nights at home, but his terrified mother and his none too stoical father were there to rival Kedzie in devotion. Importance was in the air. There was a stir of history in the public mood. The flags rippled with a new twinkle of stars and a fiercer writhing of stripes. The red had the omen of blood. On the third day there was a ruffle of drums and a crying of brass on Fifth Avenue. People recalled the great days when the boys in blue had paraded away to the wars. Only this regiment marched up, not down, the Avenue. It was the Sixty-ninth, its flagstaff solid with the silver rings of battle. It was moving north to the mobilization-camp. On the ninth day the Seventh went down the Avenue, twelve hundred strong, to entrain for Texas. The bullets of the foe were not the only dangers. It was midsummer and these men were bound for the tropics and the cursed fields of sand where the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and the scorpion lurked under the cactus. Jim's mother thought less of the Mexicans than of the fact that there were no sleeping-cars even for the officers. They would get them on the way, but it would be a fearsome journey ever southward into the heat, six days in the troop-trains.