young lady when she liked, was playing a sly game with him. However he pretended to take her seriously. "In most social sets names are fairly permanent."

Terry laughed outright and looked away from him, following the river with her eyes. "There's nothing permanent about Maisie. I think that's her attraction; that's what makes people forgive her everything. She starts each day afresh—it really is a new day for her, with no old hates or griefs or

dreads to drag her down. She has no regrets because she remembers nothing. Whatever happened yesterday she puts out of mind; she forgets everything except her willingness to be friends."

"Her names as well, according to your account."

"Yes, there's no denying that. Until the war ended, if you'd not seen her for a month, you were never quite sure how you ought to address her. Even now one's liable to make a mistake. To-day she's Maisie Lockwood; to-morrow she may be Maisie Anything—Mrs. Adair Easterday, perhaps."

Under her willful mystifications his calmness was getting ruffled. While he listened to her, he kept comparing this day with the other day that his imagination had painted. The world was to have been so much better and kinder when the agony of the trenches was ended. It was in order that it might be better that so many men had not come back. And this was the kinder world—a world in which men, saved from the jaws of death, met the girls they had loved as strangers, in whose presence, if they were to avoid offense, they must pick their words! A world full of men like Adair, who had been honorable until others had made them safe by their sacrifice, and of women like Maisie of the many names, who forgot her yesterdays that she might seize her selfish personal happiness!

"Terry," he spoke with a show of patience, "do you think it's a matter about which to jest? There's your sister and her kiddies; their future's at stake. If I'm to be of any help——" He broke off, for a voice inside his brain had started talking, "You're

old. That's exactly the way in which her father speaks to her." Was it her thoughts that he had heard? Her face was lowered; he could see nothing but the top of her golden head. Youth radiated from her; even in his anger it intoxicated him.

"So if I'm to help," he picked up his thread, "you mustn't mock. It isn't decent, Terry; the situation's too serious. Let me have the facts. How does she come by all these different names? Does she call herself something different with each new dress?"

Terry's eyes were wide and sorry. "No, with each new husband, but——" There came a break in her voice, "Oh, Tabs, I can't bear that you should be cross with me. You've been disappointed in me from the moment we met. We're not the same. And I know it's not all my fault. And——"

Her lips trembled. He was in terror lest she would give way to crying. If it hadn't been for the table that parted them with its unromantic débris of dishes—— As it was he leant across and assured her earnestly, "I'm not cross with you, my dearest girl. I'm—— Terry, how is it that we've drifted so apart? I keep groping after the old Terry; for a minute I think I've found her, and then she's no longer there."

Drying her eyes, she nodded. "It hurts most frightfully. That's what I keep doing, barking my shins in the dark, trying to follow the old Tabs. He's always going away from me——"

"I think it's the laughter that I miss most," she said presently; "you've grown so stern."

"I've seen stern things happen—a kind of Judgment Day. It's remembered things that are so silencing."

"I know what you mean. I saw some of those things in our hospital in France." She shut her eyes as if the memory was unbearable. "But don't be hard on people who have a right to be young and who want to forget. It isn't that they're ungrateful." Then she surprised him, "People like Maisie and myself."

"Don't couple yourself with her." He spoke more sharply than he had intended.

"But she was with me out there," she expostulated. "That was how she met her second husband, Gervis. She nursed him."

"It makes no difference how she met him; she's not in your class—a woman who has been divorced three times."

"But she hasn't. Whatever made you think that?" Terry shot upright on her chair, for all the world like a startled rabbit.

"You told me she'd had three husbands." He was once more puzzled and uncertain of his ground. "You as good as said that she wouldn't be averse to making a fourth of Adair. I therefore conjectured——"

"You conjectured all wrong," she cut him short. "They died for their country."

"All of them?" He was making a rapid calculation as to how long could have elapsed between each re-marriage.

"One at a time, of course," she added. "She

was married to the first the first week of the war."

"Even so it was quick work. May I light a cigarette? Three husbands in four years! She must be a very alluring person!"

Terry laughed nervously. "She is, though you mayn't think it. I can see you don't; you think she's horrid. But let me tell you it takes a smart woman to bring three men to the point of matrimony when the world's so full of unmarried girls. And they were every one of them more or less famous—the kind of men of whom any woman would be proud. You'll remember Pollock—Reggie Pollock; he was one of the earliest of our aces—the man who brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and got killed himself a few days later, no one quite knew how. There was a mystery about his death. He was the man to whom she was first married."

"A splendid chap! And I recall her now. Her portrait was in the illustrated papers at the time of her third marriage. It was headed A Conscientious War-Worker or something like that. And I don't forget the name the soldiers called her when they read the papers in the trenches."

"Did they call her something?" She was gazing at him intently. "Was it something brutal that you wouldn't like to tell me?"

"It was something true," he said, pinching out his cigarette with quiet fierceness.

"Oh, I don't know——" She broke off to ask the waitress whether the car had arrived and was answered in the affirmative. "I don't know about its being true. After all, she made three men happy

before they went West. I don't see that she'd have been any more to be admired if she'd allowed the last two to go wretched."

Tabs half-rose and then reseated himself. "An awful woman! Insatiable! A Lucrezia Borgia, without Lucrezia Borgia's excuse."

"I knew you'd say that." Terry spoke hopelessly in a tone that dragged. "How do you or I know what excuses she had? How do we know why anybody does anything—what hidden reasons they have? And yet we're always so eager to condemn! I wanted to be the first to let you know about Adair because you always used to understand. You would have understood if you'd been the you that you were. I thought that if I explained to you about Maisie—— But what's the use!"

She rose from her chair and stood leaning against the table, looking wilted and pathetic. When she spoke again the heat had gone out of her words and was replaced by an appealing tenderness. "Don't you see what it is—why it is that I don't condemn? I'm so sorry for them—so sorry for you, for myself, for everybody. It hurts me here, Tabs." She laid her hand against her breast. "We all want what we've spent in the lost years. We want it so impatiently. We can't get it; but we want it at once—now. The things one wants are always in the past or the future, so one cheats to get them now."

He hadn't the remotest