Ive Married Marjorie | Page 3

indecent that she should have let him kneel
there with his head against her laces, calling her his wife. She had
smiled down at him, then, shyly, and--half-proud, half-timid--had
thought it was very wonderful.
"When I see him it will be all right! When we meet it will all come
back!" she said half-aloud, walking restlessly up and down the office.
"It must. It will have to."
But in her heart she knew that she was wishing desperately that the war
had lasted ages longer, that he had been kept a year after the end of the
war instead of eight months; almost, down deep in her heart where she
couldn't get at it enough to deny it, that he had been killed. . . . Well,
she had a week longer, anyway. You can do a great deal with yourself
in a week if you bully hard. And the ships were almost always a much
longer time getting in than anybody said they would be, and then they
sent you to camps first.
Marjorie had the too many nerves of the native American, but she had
the pluck that generally goes with them. She forced herself to sit
quietly down and work at her task, and wished that she could stop
being angry at herself for telling Lucille that Francis had written he was
coming home. Because Lucille worked where she did, and had
promptly spread the glad tidings from the top of the office to the
bottom, and her morning had been a levee. Even poor little Mrs.
Jardine, whose boy had been killed before he had been over two weeks,
had spoken to Marjorie brightly, and said how glad she was, and silent,
stiff Miss Gardner, who was said never to have had any lovers in her

life, had looked at her with an envy she tried to hide, and said that she
supposed Marjorie was glad.
"Well, it's two weeks, maybe. Two weeks is ages."
Marjorie dived headfirst into the filing cabinet again, and was saying to
herself very fast, "Timmins, Tolman, Turnbull--oh, dear, Turnbull----"
when, very softly, the swinging-door that shut her off from the rest of
the office was pushed open again, and some one crossed sharply to her
side. She flung up her head in terror. Suppose it should be Francis--
Well, it was.
She had no more than time for one gasp before he very naturally had
her in his arms, as one who has a right, and was holding her so tight she
could scarcely breathe. She tried to kiss him back, but it was
half-hearted. She hoped, her mind working with a cold, quick precision,
that he could not tell that she did not love him. And apparently he could
not. He let her go after a minute, and flung himself down by her in just
the attitude that the knock on the door, fifteen months ago, had
interrupted. And Marjorie tried not to stiffen herself, and not to wonder
if anybody was coming in, and not to feel that a perfect stranger was
doing something he had no right to.
It was to be supposed that she succeeded more or less, because when he
finally let her go, he looked at her as fondly as he had when he entered,
and began to talk, without much preface, very much as if he had only
been gone a half hour.
"They'll let you off, won't they, for the rest of the day? But of course
they will! I almost ran over an old gentleman outside here, and it comes
to me now that he said something like 'take your wife home for to-day,
my boy!' I was in such a hurry to get at you, Marge, that I didn't listen.
My wife! Good Lord, to think I have her again!"
She got her breath a little, and stopped shivering, and looked at him. He
had not changed much; one does not in fifteen months. It was the same
eager, dark young face, almost too sharply cut for a young man's, with

very bright dark eyes. The principal difference was in his expression.
Before he went he had had a great deal of expression, a face that
showed almost too much of what he thought. That was gone. His face
was younger-looking, because the flashing of changes over it was gone.
He looked wondering, very tired, and dulled somehow. And he spoke
without the turns of speech that she and her friends amused each other
with, the little quaintnesses of conscious fancy. "As if he'd been talking
to children," she thought.
Then she remembered that it was not that. He had been giving orders,
and taking them, and being on firing-lines; all the things that he had
written her about, and that had