"You must be hungry," she said. "I'll get you something to eat."

"I don't feel much like eating,"--MacRae followed her into the
kitchen--"but I can drink a cup of tea."

He sat on a corner of the kitchen table while she busied herself with
the kettle and teapot, marveling that in four years everything should
apparently remain the same and still suffer such grievous change. There
was an air of forlornness about the house which hurt him. The place had
run down, as the sands of his father's life were running down. Of the
things unchanged the girl he watched was one. Yet as he looked with
keener appraisal, he saw that Dolly Ferrara too had changed.

Her dusky cloud of hair was as of old; her wide, dark eyes still
mirrored faithfully every shift of feeling, and her incomparable creamy
skin was more beautiful than ever. Moving, she had lost none of her
lithe grace. And though she had met him as if it had been only yesterday
they parted, still there was a difference which somehow eluded him. He
could feel it, but it was not to be defined. It struck him for the first
time that many who had never seen a battlefield, never heard a screaming
shell, nor shuddered at the agony of a dressing station, might still
have suffered by and of and through the reactions of war.

They drank their tea and ate a slice of toast in silence. MacRae's
comrades in France had called him "Silent" John, because of his lapses
into concentrated thought, his habit of a close mouth when he was hurt
or troubled or uncertain. One of the things for which he had liked Dolly
Ferrara had been her possession of the same trait, uncommon in a girl.
She could sit on the cliffs or lie with him in a rowboat lifting and