nsisted
on helping Lane get Red aboard the train. Red could just about walk.
Sombrely they clambered up the steps into the Pullman.

Middleville was a prosperous and thriving inland town of twenty
thousand inhabitants, identical with many towns of about the same size
in the middle and eastern United States.

Lane had been born there and had lived there all his life, seldom
having been away up to the advent of the war. So that the memories of
home and town and place, which he carried away from America with him,
had never had any chance, up to the time of his departure, to change
from the vivid, exaggerated image of boyhood. Since he had left
Middleville he had seen great cities, palaces, castles, edifices, he
had crossed great rivers, he had traveled thousands of miles, he had
looked down some of the famous thoroughfares of the world.

Was this then the reason that Middleville, upon his arrival, seemed
so strange, sordid, shrunken, so vastly changed? He stared, even while
he helped Payson off the train--stared at the little brick station at
once so familiar and yet so strange, that had held a place of dignity
in the picture of his memory. The moment was one of shock.

Then he was distracted from his pondering by tearful and joyful cries,
and deeper voices of men. He looked up to recognize Blair's mother,
father, sister; and men and women whose faces appeared familiar, but
whose names he could not recall. His acute faculty of perception took
quick note of a change in Blair's mother. Lane turned his gaze away.
The agony of joy and sorrow--the light of her face--was more than Lane
could stand. He looked at the sister Margaret--a tall, fair girl. She
had paint on her cheeks. She did not see Lane. Her strained gaze held
a beautiful and piercing intentness. Then her eyes opened wide, her
hand went to cover her mouth, and she cried out: "Oh Blair!--poor boy!
Brother!"

Only Lane heard her. The others were crying out themselves as Blair's
gray-haired mother received him into her arms. She seemed a proud
woman, broken and unsteady. Red Payson's grip on Lane's arm told what
that scene meant to him. How pitiful the vain effort of Blair's people
to hide their horror! Presently mother and sister and women relatives
fell aside to let the soldier boy meet his father. This was something
that rang the bells in Lane's heart. Men were different, and Blair
faced his father differently. The wild boy had come home--the
scapegoat of many