It was a solitaire diamond, conventionally set, and larger, far larger,
than the modest little stone on which Harvey had been casting anxious
glances for months.
"Do you like it, honey?" he asked anxiously.
Sara Lee looked at it on her finger.
"It is lovely! It--it's terrible!" said poor Sara Lee, and cried on his
shoulder.
Harvey was not subtle. He had never even heard of Mabel Andrews, and
he had a tendency to restrict his war reading to the quarter column in
the morning paper entitled "Salient Points of the Day's War News."
What could he know, for instance, of wounded men who were hungry? Which
is what Mabel wrote about.
"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and
something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but
just now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty
of it. But here--yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy.
He had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or
coffee."
It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a
long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government, thrust
out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and with no
_materiel_ of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army.
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