"Quite nothing?" Henriette persisted. "Nothing about poor, little, plain, much-abused sisters?"
"No. I don't know what you mean, Henriette. The war is here. We are both on our nerves. And—he will propose again. He loves you."
Henriette smiled with something of her usual sweetness, touched with a bantering acidity.
"If I wish it!" she said, turning abruptly to go.
"Henriette, please not to-night! We don't know what may happen to-morrow," Helen pleaded.
"I must pack," replied Henriette rather irrelevantly, and was gone.
Irritating enough this task at all times, let alone when you may take only a small box and everything that you leave behind may fall into the hands of a conqueror. Henriette looked into the big closet at the array of gowns and the row of shoes under the drooping skirts and spread out her hands hopelessly.
"I can buy new gowns," she said. "It's the laces and jewelry and the mementoes that must go."
She unlocked an old carved chest and in turn unlocked a drawer within which was crammed full of bundles of letters, each tied with a bit of pink ribbon. There must have been a dozen bundles and she smiled at their number.
"When I am so young, too!" she mused. "Why take them? Why not leave them locked up? But the Germans might break open the chest and read them. No, they must go—at the very bottom of the trunk;" where she laid the trophies of conquest before she thought of anything else.