Much of Sara Lee's life at home had faded. She seemed to be two people.
One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it
away from Uncle James' kind but curious eyes. And one was this present
Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer
horribly, not to gain anything--except perhaps some honorable
advancement for their souls--but that there might be preserved, at any
cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to
pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God.
She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future. So she
was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers
and at last its sleep. Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter.
She reread his letters often, but they were forced. And after a time
she realized another quality in them. They were self-centered. It was
his anxiety, his loneliness, his humiliation. Sara Lee's eyes were
looking out, those days, over a suffering world. Harvey's eyes were
turned in on himself.
She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself. What
she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come
sometime--that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that
day, that he would say things that he would regret later. Sometimes the
thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her
hands would tremble.
Henri had not returned when, the second day after Rene's death, the
letter came which recalled her. She opened it eagerly. Though from
Harvey there usually came at the best veiled reproach, the society had
always sent its enthusiastic approval.
She read it twice before she understood, and it was only when she read
Belle's letter again that she began to comprehend. She was recalled;
and the recall was Harvey's work.
She was very close to hating him that day. He had never understood.
She would go back to him, as she had promised; but always, all the rest
of their lives, there would be this barrier between them. To the
barrier of his bitterness would be added her own resentment. She could
never even talk to him of her work, of those great days when in her
small way she had felt herself a part of the machinery of mercy of
the war.
Harvey had lost something out of Sara Lee's love for him. He had done
it himself, madly, despairingly. She still loved him, she felt. Nothing
could change that or her promise to him. But with that love there was
something now of fear. And she felt, too, that after all the years she
had known him she had not known him at all. The Harvey she had known
was a tender and considerate man, soft-spoken, slow to wrath, always
gentle. But the Harvey of his letters and of the recall was a stranger.