Kedzie's answer was a fierce seizure of him in her arms. She was palsied with fright for him. She had seen more pictures of dead soldiers than he knew, and now she saw her man shattered and tortured with wounds and thirst. She felt in one swift shock what the wives of Europe had felt by the million. She clung to Jim and sobbed:

“You sha'n't go! I won't let them take you! You belong to me!”

He gathered her awkwardly into his arms and they were more nearly married then than they had ever been or should ever be again.

The pity of it! that only their separation could bring them together! Fate is the original Irish-bullster.

Jim tried hurriedly to console Kedzie. He found her hard to make brave. The early-morningness of the shock, the panic of scattered sleep, gave her added terror. He had to be cruel at last. Without intention of humor he said:

“Really, honey, you know you just can't keep the President waiting.”

He tore loose the tendrils of her fingers and ran to his own dressing-room. She wept awhile, then rose to help accoutre him. He had his uniform at home still.

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.

Kedzie was proud of her husband, quite conceited about him, glad that he was marching instead of standing on the curb. But her heart, doubled in bulk, pounded against her side like the leaden clapper of a broken bell.

Jim caught sight of her where she stood on the steps of his father's house, and her eyes, bright with tears, saddened him. The fond gaze of his mother touched another well-spring of emotion, and the big, proud stare of his father another.

But when by chance among the mosaic of faces he saw Charity Coe there was a sorrow in her look that made him stumble, and his heart lost step with the music. Somehow it seemed cruelest of all to leave her there.