“You are like wine,” he told her. “Jane, how do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Hold the pose of youth and joy and happiness?”

“You know it isn’t a pose. I just feel that way, Evans.”

“My dear, I believe you do.”

He limped a little as he walked beside her. He was tall and gaunt. Almost grotesquely tall. Yet when he had gone to war he had not seemed in the least grotesque. He had been tall but not thin, and he had gone in all the glory of his splendid youth.

There was no glory left. He was twenty-seven. He had fought and he would fight again for the same cause. But his youth was dead, except when he was with Jane. She revived him, as he said, like wine.

“I was coming over,” he began, and broke off as a sibilant sound interrupted him.

“Oh, are the cats with you? Well, Rusty must take the road,” he laughed as the little old dog trotted to neutral ground at the edge of the grove. Rusty was friends with Merrymaid, except when there were kittens about. He knew enough to avoid her in days of anxious motherhood.

Jane picked up the kitten. “They would come.”

“All animals follow you. You’re sort of a domestic[18] Circe—with your dogs and chickens and pussy-cats in the place of tigers and lions and leopards.”

[18]

“I’d love to have lived in Eden,” said Jane, unexpectedly, “before Eve and Adam sinned. What it must have meant to have all those great beasts mild-mannered and purring under your hand like this kitten. What a dreadful thing happened, Evans, when fear came into the world.”

“What makes you say that now, Jane?” His voice was sharp.

“Shouldn’t I have said it? Oh, Evans, you can’t think I had you in mind——”

“No,” with a touch of weariness, “but you are the only one, really, who knows what a coward I am——”

“Evans, you’re not.”

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