There was too much he would not understand. She could not write frankly
without telling of Henri, and to this point everything had centered
about Henri. It all rather worried her, because there was nothing she
was ashamed of, nothing she should have had to conceal. She had yet to
learn, had Sara Lee, that many of the concealments of life are based
not on wrongdoing but on fear of misunderstanding.

So she got as far as: "_Dearest Harvey_: I am here in a hotel at
Dunkirk"--and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness.
Not so much for Harvey as for familiar things--Uncle James in his chair
by the fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the
West"; her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the
dining-room window; the voices of happy children wandering home from
school.

She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle.
Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry
with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top
of the _mairie_ perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger,
came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer
for quiet sleep.

For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had
nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama
that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for
his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor
lorries--she called them trucks--piled high with supplies, often
fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food.
Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers,
detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers.