moral scruple
against self-destruction. He clung to life because instinct was
stronger than reason, stronger than any of the appalling facts he
encountered and knew he must go on encountering. He had to live, with
a past that was no comfort, going on down the pathway of a future
which he attempted not to see clearly, because when he did envisage it
he was stricken with just such a panic as now overwhelmed him.

To live on and on, a pariah among his fellows because of his
disfigurement. A man with a twisted face, a gargoyle of a countenance.
To have people always shrink from him. To be denied companionship,
friendship, love, to know that so many things which made life
beautiful were always just beyond his reach. To be merely endured. To
have women pity him--and shun him.

The sweat broke out on Hollister's face when he thought of all that.
He knew that it was true. This knowledge had been growing on him for
weeks. To-night the full realization of what it meant engulfed him
with terror. That was all. He did not cry out against injustice. He
did not whine a protest. He blamed no one. He understood, when he
looked at himself in the glass.

After a time he shook off the first paralyzing grip of this unnameable
terror which had seized him with clammy hands, fought it down by sheer
resolution. He was able to lie staring into the dusky spaces of his
room and review the stirring panorama of his existence for the past
four years. There was nothing that did not fill him with infinite
regret--and there was nothing which by any conceivable effort he could
have changed. He could not have escaped one of those calamities which
had befallen him. He could not have left undone a single act that he
had performed. There was an inexorable continuity in it all. There
had been a great game. He had been one of the pawns.

Hollister shut his eyes. Immediately, like motion pictures projected
upon a screen, his mind began to project visions. He saw himself
kissing his wife good-by. He saw the tears shining in her eyes. He
felt again the clinging pressure of her arms, her cry that she would
be so lonely. He saw himself in billets, poring over her letters. He
saw himself swinging up the line with his company, crawling back with
shattered ranks after a hammering, repeating this over and over again
till it seemed like a nightmare in which all existence was comprised
in blood and wounds and death and sorrow, enacted at stated intervals
to the rum