He read it and gave it back to her.

“I don’t think you mean it,” he said.  “I give you credit for too much sense.  Maybe some one is needed over there.  I guess things are pretty bad.  But why should you make it your affair?  There are about a million women in this country that haven’t got anything else to do.  Let them go.”

“Some of them will.  But they’re afraid, mostly.”

“Afraid!  My God, I should think they would be afraid!  And you’re asking me to let you go into danger, to put off our wedding while you wander about over there with a million men and no women and—­”

“You’re wrong, Harvey dear,” said Sara Lee in a low voice.  “I am not asking you at all.  I am telling you that I am going.”

Sara Lee’s leaving made an enormous stir in her small community.  Opinion was divided.  She was right according to some; she was mad according to others.  The women of the Methodist Church, finding a real field of activity, stood behind her solidly.  Guaranties of funds came in in a steady flow, though the amounts were small; and, on the word going about that she was to start a soup kitchen for the wounded, housewives sent in directions for making their most cherished soups.

Sara Lee, going to a land where the meat was mostly horse and where vegetables were scarce and limited to potatoes, Brussels sprouts and cabbage, found herself the possessor of recipes for making such sick-room dainties as mushroom soup, cream of asparagus, clam broth with whipped cream, and from Mrs. Gregory, the wealthy woman of the church—­green turtle and consomme.

She was very busy and rather sad.  She was helping Aunt Harriet to close the house and getting her small wardrobe in order.  And once a day she went to a school of languages and painfully learned from a fierce and kindly old Frenchman a list of French nouns and prefixes like this:  Le livre, le crayon, la plume, la fenetre, and so on.  By the end of ten days she could say:  “La rose sent-elle bon?”

Considering that Harvey came every night and ran the gamut of the emotions, from pleading and expostulation at eight o’clock to black fury at ten, when he banged out of the house, Sara Lee was amazingly calm.  If she had moments of weakness, when the call from overseas was less insistent than the call for peace and protection—­if the nightly drawn picture of the Leete house, with tile mantels and a white bathroom, sometimes obtruded itself as against her approaching homelessness, Sara Lee made no sign.

She had her photograph taken for her passport, and when Harvey refused one she sent it to him by mail, with the word “Please” in the corner.  Harvey groaned over it, and got it out at night and scolded it wildly; and then slept with it under his pillows, when he slept at all.

Not Sara Lee, and certainly not Harvey, knew what was calling her.  And even later, when waves of homesickness racked her with wild remorse, she knew that she had had to go and that she could not return until she had done the thing for which she had been sent, whatever that might be.