Alone in her room with Polly-Ann to watch proceedings, she got out the lovely gown.

“Oh, I do want to be pretty, Polly-Ann,” she said with much wistfulness.

Yet when she was all hooked and snapped into it, she surveyed herself with some dissatisfaction in the mirror.

“Why not?” she asked the mirror.  “Why shouldn’t I wear it?”

The mirror gave back a vision of beauty—­but behind that vision in the depths of limitless space Jean’s eyes discerned something which made her change her gown.  Quite soberly she got herself into a little nun’s frock of gray with collars and cuffs of transparent white, and above it all was the glory of her crinkled hair.

Neither then nor afterwards could she analyze her reasons for the change.  Perhaps sub-consciously she was perceiving that this meeting with Derry Drake was to be a serious and stupendous occasion.  Throughout the world the emotions of men and women were being quickened to a pace set by a mighty conflict.  Never again would Jean McKenzie laugh or cry over little things.  She would laugh and cry, of course, but back of it all would be that sense of the world’s travail and tragedy, made personal by her own part in it.

Julia, the second maid, was instructed to show Mr. Drake into the little drawing room.  Jean came down early with her knitting, and sat on the deep-rose Davenport.  The curtains were not drawn.  There was always the chance of a sunset view.  Julia was to turn on the light when she brought in the tea.

There was the whir of a bell, the murmur of voices.  Jean sat tense.  Then as her caller entered, she got somewhat shakily on her feet.

But the man in the door was not Derry Drake!

In his intrusive and impertinent green, pinched-in as to waist, and puffed-out as to trousers, his cheeks red with the cold, his brown eyes bright with eagerness, Ralph Witherspoon stood on the threshold.

“Of all the good luck,” he said, “to find you in.”

She shook hands with him and sat down.

“I thought you had gone back to Bay Shore.  You said yesterday you were going.”

“I got my orders in the nick of time.  We are to go to Key West.  I am to join the others on the way down.”

“How soon?”

He sat at the other end of the davenport.  “In three days, and anything can happen in three days.”

He moved closer.  She had a sense of panic.  Was he going to propose to her again, in this room which she had set aside so sacredly for Derry Drake?

“Won’t you have some tea?” she asked, desperately.  “I’ll have Julia bring it in.”

“I’d rather talk.”

But she had it brought, and Julia, wheeling in the tea-cart, offered a moment’s reprieve.  And Ralph ate the Lady-bread-and-butter, and the little pound cakes with the nuts and white frosting which had been meant for Derry, and then he walked around the tea-cart and took her hand, and for the seventh time since he had met her he asked her to marry him.