light-hearted soldier, and if I’m anything else I get no sympathy.”

“Yes you do, Larry—plenty from me,” Lucy protested. “But, you see, I count on you a lot myself, so I have to laugh at the idea of your getting low in your mind, or I’d feel twice as lost as I do alone.”

“Is that plain to you, Captain Eaton?” asked Armand, amused, and Larry, smiling in spite of himself, said more cheerfully:

“That’s a real Lucy explanation. Well, I’ll have to carry on in the Home Sector and play up to my part.”

“Other people have had to,” said Lucy, glancing at Michelle. She could not yet look into her friend’s face without remembering with a warm thrill of admiration the almost hopeless days of captivity when Michelle’s splendid courage and cheerfulness had spurred her to equal fortitude. “I’m afraid I don’t quite stand on my own legs when trouble comes,” she added, with some irrelevance for those who could not follow her thoughts. “I always need someone to keep me going.”

“I don’t know. You’ve stood up pretty well, I think,” said Larry, more eager in her defense than in his own. “For instance, the time you——”

“Escaped from Château-Plessis,” broke in Michelle, with equal enthusiasm. “There was not anyone to push you to the lines of the Alliés, or to shut the Germans’ eyes.”

“And how about the night you flew with me into Germany?” persisted Larry. “I didn’t encourage you then, that’s sure.”

“I don’t mean all that,” Lucy interposed, flushing warmly at having provoked this unexpected praise. “Anyone can be brave once in a while. With me it’s more desperation than courage. If ever you hear that I’ve done anything you think took nerve, you may know I did it because something else frightened me still more.”

“You can’t take your motives to pieces that way,” objected Larry, never good at argument. “You were brave, and that’s all there was to it.”

“But the sort of bravery that I admire,” Lucy continued earnestly, “is the sort that lasts. I was more hopeless after five weeks at Château-Plessis than Michelle after four years. I couldn’t have endured what she did.”

“Oh, perhaps I saw fear and sorrow so often in those years I came to know well their faces and did not mind them,” said Michelle, trying to speak lightly. “My courage was not very great—a prisoner has the same.” She slipped her hand through 

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