“I’ll go back and write that letter.  Here is the one I wrote last night.”

He took it from his pocket, tore it in two, and gave it to her.  Then he turned away and walked with the soldier’s step home.  Jerome could not look at her.  He began moving back the picture.

“There!” he said, “it’s finished.  Better make up your mind where you’ll have it put.  I shall be picking up my traps this morning.”

Then Mary gave him his other surprise.  Her hands were on his shoulders.  Her eyes, full of the welling gratitude that is one kind of love, spoke like her lips.

“Oh!” said she, “do you think I don’t know what you’ve done?  I couldn’t take it from anybody else.  I couldn’t let him take it.  It’s like standing beside him in battle; like lending him your horse, your sword.  It’s being a comrade.  It’s helping him fight.  And he will fight.  That’s the glory of it!”

The Bitter Cup

BY CHARLES B. DE CAMP

Clara Leeds sat by the open window of her sitting-room with her fancy work.  Her hair was done up in an irreproachable style, and her finger-nails were carefully manicured and pink like little shells.  She had a slender waist, and looked down at it from time to time with satisfied eyes.  At the back of her collar was a little burst of chiffon; for chiffon so arranged was the fashion.  She cast idle glances at the prospect from the window.  It was not an alluring one—­a row of brick houses with an annoying irregularity of open and closed shutters.

There was the quiet rumble of a carriage in the street, and Clara Leeds leaned forward, her eyes following the vehicle until to look further would have necessitated leaning out of the window.  There were two women in the carriage, both young and soberly dressed.  To certain eyes they might have appeared out of place in a carriage, and yet, somehow, it was obvious that it was their own.  Clara Leeds resumed her work, making quick, jerky stitches.

“Clara Leeds,” she murmured, as if irritated.  She frowned and then sighed.  “If only—­if only it was something else; if it only had two syllables....”  She put aside her work and went and stood before the mirror of her dresser.  She looked long at her face.  It was fresh and pretty, and her blue eyes, in spite of their unhappy look, were clear and shining.  She fingered a strand of hair, and then cast critical sidelong glances at her profile.  She smoothed her waist-line with a movement peculiar to women.  Then she tilted the glass and regarded the reflection from head to foot.

“Oh, what is it?” she demanded, distressed, of herself in the glass.  She took up her work again.