Part 45

"I can go and find out," he said quietly. "It is possible, though I do not see how." He smiled. "They are, I think, only drying themselves at our expense. It is a bit of German humor."

But the cry of "Calais in a month!" was in the air, and undoubtedly there had been renewed activity along the German Front near the sea. The second question to be answered was dependent on the first.

Had the Germans, as Henri said, merely shifted the water, by some clever engineering, to the Belgian trenches, or was there some bigger thing on hand? What, for instance, if they were about to attempt to drain the inundation, smash the Belgian line, and march by the Dunkirk road to Calais?

So, that night while Henri jested about Pierre's right elbow and watched Sara Lee for a smile, he had difficult work before him.

Sometime near midnight he slipped away. Jean was waiting in the street, and wrung the boy's hand.

"I could go with you," he said rather wistfully.

"You don't speak their ugly tongue."

"I could be mute--shell shock. You could be helping me back."

But Henri only held his hand a moment and shook his head.

"You would double the risk, and--what good would it do?"

"Two pistols are better than one."

"I have two pistols, my friend," said Henri, and turned the corner of the building, past the boards René had built in, toward the house of the mill. But once out of Jean's sight he stopped a moment, his hand resting against that frail wall to Sara Lee's room. It was his good-by to her.

For three days Jean stayed in the village. He slept at the mill, but he came for his meals to the little house. Once he went to Dunkirk and brought out provisions and the mail, including Sara Lee's monthly allowance. But mostly he sat in the mill house and waited. He could not read.

"You do not eat at all, Jean," Sara Lee said to him more than once. And twice she insisted that he was feverish, and placed a hand that was somewhat marred with much peeling of vegetables, on his forehead.

"I am entirely well, mademoiselle," he would say, and draw back. He had anxieties enough just now without being reminded by the touch of a woman's hand of all that he had lost.

Long before that Sara Lee had learned not to question Jean about Henri's absences. Even his knowledge, now, that she knew something of Henri's work, did not remove the barrier. So Sara Lee waited, as did Jean, but more helplessly. She knew something was wrong, but she had not Jean's privilege of going at night to the trenches and there waiting, staring over the gray water with its ugly floating shadows, for Henri to emerge from the flood.

Something rather forced and mechanical there was those days in her work. Her smile was rather set. She did not sleep well. And one night she violated Henri's orders and walked across the softened fields to beyond the poplar trees.

There was nothing to see except an intermittent flash from the clouds that hung low over the sea at Nieuport, where British gunboats were bombarding the coast; or the steady streaks from the Ypres salient, where night and day the guns never rested.

From the Belgian trenches, fifteen hundred feet or so away, there was no sound. A German electric signal blazed its message in code, and went out quickly. Now and then a rifle shot, thin and sharp, rang out from where, under the floating starlights, keen eyes on each side watched for movements on the other.

Sara Lee sat down under a tree and watched for a while. Then she found herself crying softly. It was all so sad, and useless, and cruel. And somewhere there ahead was Henri, Henri with his blue eyes, his smile, the ardor of his young arms--Henri, who had been to her many friends.

Sara Lee had never deceived herself about Henri. She loved him. But she was quite certain she was not in love with him, which is entirely different. She knew that this last was impossible, because she was engaged to Harvey. What was probably the truth was that she loved them both in entirely different ways. Men have always insisted on such possibilities, and have even asserted their right, now and then, to love two women at the same time. But women are less frank with themselves.

And, in such cases, there is no grand passion. There are tenderness, and the joy of companionship, and sometimes a touching dependence. But it is not a love that burns with a white fire.

Perhaps Sara Lee was one of those women who are always loved more than they love. There are such women, not selfish, not seeking love, but softly feminine, kind, appealing and genuine. Men need, after all, but an altar on which to lay tribute. And the high, remote white altar that was Sara Lee had already received the love of two strong men.

She was not troubling her head that night, however, about being an altar, of a sort. She cried a little at first, because she was terrified for Henri and because Jean's face was growing pinched and gray. Then she cried very hard, prone on the ground and face down, because Henri was young, and all of life should have been before him. And he was missing.

Henri was undeniably missing. Even the King knew it now, and set down in his heart, among the other crosses there, Henri's full name, which we may not know, and took to pacing his little study and looking out at the spring sea.

That night Marie, having ladled to the bottom of her kettle, found Sara Lee missing, and was told by René of the direction she had taken. Marie, muttering to herself, set out to find her, and almost stumbled over her in the wood by the road.

She sat down on the ground without a word and placed a clumsy hand on the girl's shoulder. It was not until Sara Lee ceased sobbing that she spoke:

"It is far from hopeless, mademoiselle."