"What a lovely sunset!" said Dolly in the open door.
"Yes," said Lisette, "isn't it?"
"Your car is there?"
"Yes; good-bye, Dolly darling; good-bye, Jacques, and thank you."
As they turned back from the door, Dolly said, "Poor little thing, isn't she lovely in her mourning?"
She put her arm through his as they went across the hall together. "I'm so glad to have you, Jacques," she said, "you can't imagine, and I'm so proud of you. You don't forget me there, Jacques; you love me just as you always did?"
He was thinking. Six days' leave, perhaps two days extended. In nine days Dolly might be wearing a little white frill inside a veil of heavy crape, and just her pearls. And she would say to people that he had been all her life, and that it was the death he would have chosen. And in six weeks she would let the salon be used for just a little music for the blind.
"Do you know," she said as they went up the stairs together, "it was most beautiful, that thing Lisette said, her little summing up of it: 'His whole life was the woman who loved him, and for his country he died.' It made me think, you know, of Dante, those four lines of Pia dei Tolomei."
At the top of the stairs she turned to him, a step or two above him, standing higher than he. "Look at me, Jacques, and tell me I have not changed, and that you love me. What are you laughing at?"
"Nothing." He came up the steps and took her hands, and kissed the fingers of first one hand then the other. "These last weeks I have been always laughing; you must not mind. And, dear, I'm so glad you do your hair like that, and remember things from Dante, and play with the tips of roses, and that you do not understand."