ng at
first that you were very far away, and that I could not reach you." And
she had said that, when his soul ached to have her near.

Yet he had tried to do the best that he could for Becky. He had felt
that she must not be bound by a tie that was no longer needed to protect
her from Dalton. She was safe at 'Sconset, with the Admiral and her new
friends the Copes. He envied them, their hours with her. He was
desperately lonely, with a loneliness which had no hope.

He worked intensively. The boarders had gone from King's Crest, and he
and the Major had moved into the big house. Randy spent a good deal of
time in the Judge's library at Huntersfield. He and Truxton had great
plans for their future. They read law, sold cars, and talked of their
partnership. The firm was to be "Bannister, Paine and Beaufort"; it was
to have brains, conscience, and business acumen.

"In the order named," Truxton told the Major. "The Judge has brains,
Randy has a conscience. There's nothing left for me but to put pep into
the business end of it."

Randy worked, too, on his little story. He did not know in the least
what he was going to do with it, but it was an outlet for the questions
which he kept asking himself. The war was over and the men who had
fought had ceased to be important. He and the Major and Truxton talked a
great deal about it. The Major took the high stand of each man's
satisfaction in the thing he had done. Truxton was light-heartedly
indifferent. He had his Mary, and his future was before him. But Randy
argued that the world ought not to forget. "It was a rather wonderful
thing for America. I want her to keep on being wonderful."

The Major in his heart knew that the boy was right. America must keep on
being wonderful. Her young men must go high-hearted to the tasks of
peace. It was the high-heartedness of people which had won the war. It
would be the high-heartedness of men and women which would bring sanity
and serenity to a troubled world.

"The difficulty lies in the fact that we are always trying to make laws
to right the world, when what we need is to form individual ideals. The
boy who says in his heart, 'I want to be like Lincoln,' and who stands
in front of a statue of Lincoln, and learns from that rugged countenance
the lesson of simple courage and honesty, has a better chance of a
future than the boy who is told, 'There is evil in the world, and the
law punishes those who transgress.' Half of our Bolshevi