Carr grunted.  For a minute neither spoke.  Sophie lay back in her chair, eyes half closed, fingers beating a slow rat-a-tat on the chair-arm.

“Have you seen Wes Thompson lately?” Carr inquired at last.

“I saw him this afternoon,” Sophie replied.

“Did he tell you he was going overseas?”

“No.”  Sophie’s interest seemed languid, judged by her tone.

“You saw him this afternoon, eh?” Carr drawled.  “That’s queer.”

“What’s queer?” Sophie demanded.

“That he would see you and not tell you where he was off to,” Carr went on.  “I saw him away on the Limited at six-o’clock.  He told me to tell you good-by.  He’s gone to the front.”

Sophie sat upright.

“How could he do that?” she said impatiently.  “A man can’t get into uniform and leave for France on two hours’ notice.  He called here about four.  Don’t be absurd.”

“I don’t see anything absurd except your incredulous way of taking it,” Carr defended stoutly.  “I tell you he’s gone.  I saw him take the train.  Who said anything about two hours’ notice?  I should imagine he has been getting ready for some time.  You know Wes Thompson well enough to know that he doesn’t chatter about what he’s going to do.  He sold out his business two weeks ago, and has been waiting to be passed in his tests.  He has finally been accepted and ordered to report East for training in aviation.  He joined the Royal Flying Corps.”

Carr did not know that in the circle of war workers where Sophie moved so much the R.F.C. was spoken of as the “Legion of Death.”  No one knew the percentage of casualties in that gallant service.  Such figures were never published.  All that these women knew was that their sons and brothers and lovers, clean-limbed children of the well-to-do, joined the Flying Corps, and that their lives, if glorious, were all too brief once they reached the Western front.  Only the supermen, the favored of God, survived a dozen aerial combats.  To have a son or a brother flying in France meant mourning soon or late.  So they spoke sometimes, in bitter pride, of their birdmen as the “Legion of Death”, a gruesome phrase and apt.

Carr knew the heavy casualties of aerial fighting.  But he had never seen a proud woman break down before the ominous cablegram, he had never seen a girl sit dry-eyed and ashy-white, staring dumbly at a slip of yellow paper.  And Sophie had—­many a time.  To her, a commission in the Royal Flying Corps had come to mean little short of a death warrant.

She sat now staring blankly at her father.

“He closed up his business and joined the Flying Corps two weeks ago.”

She repeated this stupidly, as if she found it almost impossible to comprehend.

“That’s what I said,” Carr replied testily.  “What the devil did you do to him that he didn’t tell you, if he was here only two hours before he left?  Why, he must have come to say good-by.”