eams, who had loved and given
and trusted, who had suffered insupportable agonies of body and soul,
who had fought like a lion for what he represented to himself, who had
killed and killed--and whose reward was change, indifference, betrayal
and death.

That dark hour passed. Lane lay spent in the blackness of his room.
His heart had broken. But his spirit was as unquenchable as the fire
of the sun. If he had a year, a month, a week, a day longer to live he
could never live it untrue to himself. Life had marked him to be a
sufferer, a victim. But nothing could kill his soul. And his soul was
his faith--something he understood as faith in God or nature or
life--in the reason for his being--in his vision of the future.

How then to spend this last remnant of his life! No one would guess
what passed through his lonely soul. No one would care. But out of the
suffering that now seemed to give him spirit and wisdom and charity
there dawned a longing to help, to save. He would return good for
evil. All had failed him, but he would fail no one.

Then he had a strange intense desire to understand the present. Only a
day home--and what colossal enigma! The war had been chaos. Was this
its aftermath? Had people been rocked on their foundations? What were
they doing--how living--how changing? He would see, and be grateful
for a little time to prove his faith. He knew he would find the same
thing in others that existed in himself.

He would help his mother, and cheer her, and try to revive something
of hope in her. He would bend a keen and patient eye upon Lorna, and
take the place of her father, and be kind, loving, yet blunt to her,
and show her the inevitable end of this dancing, dallying road.
Perhaps he could influence Helen. He would see the little
soldier-worshipping Bessy Bell, and if by talking hours and hours, by
telling the whole of his awful experience of war, he could take up
some of the time so fraught with peril for her, he would welcome the
ordeal of memory. And Mel Iden--how thought of her seemed tinged with
strange regret! Once she and he had been dear friends, and because of
a falsehood told by Helen that friendship had not been what it might
have been. Suppose Mel, instead of Helen, had loved him and been
engaged to him! Would he have been jilted and would Mel have been
lost? No! It was a subtle thing--that answer of his spirit. It did not
agree with Mel Iden's frank confession.

It might be difficult, he r