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And Lethway was now always in the background. He took her for quiet meals and brought her home early. He promised her that sometime he would see that she got back home.

“But not just yet,” he added as her colour rose. “I’m selfish, Edith. Give me a little time to be happy.”

That was a new angle. It had been a part of the boy’s quiet creed to make others happy.

“Why don’t you give me something to do, since you’re so crazy to have me hanging about?”

“Can’t do it. I’m not the management. And they’re sore at you. They think you threw them down.” He liked to air his American slang.

Edith cupped her chin in her hand and looked at him. There was no mystery about the situation, no shyness in the eyes with which she appraised him. She was beginning to like him too.

That night when she got back to Mabel’s apartment her mood was reckless. She went to the window and stood looking at the crooked and chimney-potted skyline that was London.

“Oh, what’s the use?” she said savagely, and gave up the fight.

When Mabel came home she told her.

“I’m going to get out,” she said without preamble.

She caught the relief in Mabel’s face, followed by a purely conventional protest.

“Although,” she hedged cautiously, “I don’t know, dearie. People look at things sensibly these days. You’ve got to live, haven’t you? They’re mighty quick to jail a girl who tries to jump in the river when she’s desperate.”

“I’ll probably end there. And I don’t much care.”

Mabel gave her a good talking to about that. Her early training had been in a church which regarded self-destruction as a cardinal sin. Then business acumen asserted itself:

“He’ll probably put you on somewhere. He’s crazy about you, Ede.”

But Edith was not listening. She was standing in front of her opened trunk tearing into small pieces something that had been lying in the tray.

VII

Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried feebly to move his right arm.

But it was gone.

At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But when he looked it was not there.

There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.

The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened with his eyes on her face–eyes like those of a sick child.

In that manner they got by the first few days.

“It won’t make any difference to her,” he said once. “She’d take me back if I was only a fragment.” Then bitterly: “That’s all I am–a fragment! A part of a man!”

After a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it. His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told her.

“An actress!” she cried, sitting bolt upright. “Du lieber–an actress!”

“Not an actress,” he corrected her gravely. “A–a dancer. But good. She’s a very good girl. Even when I was–was whole”–raging bitterness there–“I was not good enough for her.”

“No actress is good. And dancers!”

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” he said roughly, and turned his back to her. It was almost insulting to have her assist him to his attitude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows behind his back. Lying there he tried hard to remember that this woman belonged to his hereditary foes. He was succeeding in hating her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.