there had come a death-like hush. In the lower hall the footman was
hanging up his master's hat and overcoat. Anthony Cardew had come home
for dinner.

CHAPTER V

Mr. William Wallace Cameron, that evening of Lily's return, took a walk.
From his boarding house near the Eagle Pharmacy to the Cardew residence
was a half-hour's walk. There were a number of things he had meant to do
that evening, with a view to improving his mind, but instead he took a
walk. He had made up a schedule for those evenings when he was off
duty, thinking it out very carefully on the train to the city. And the
schedule ran something like this:

Monday: 8-11. Read History. Wednesday: 8-11. Read Politics and
Economics. Friday: 8-9:30. Travel. 9:30-11. French. Sunday: Hear various
prominent divines.

He had cut down on the travel rather severely, because travel was with
him an indulgence rather than a study. The longest journey he had ever
taken in his life was to Washington. That was early in the war, when
it did not seem possible that his country would not use him, a boy who
could tramp incredible miles in spite of his lameness and who could
shoot a frightened rabbit at almost any distance, by allowing for a
slight deflection to the right in the barrel of his old rifle.

But they had refused him.

"They won't use me, mother," he had said when he got home, home being
a small neat house on a tidy street of a little country town. "I tried
every branch, but the only training I've had--well, some smart kid said
they weren't planning to serve soda water to the army. They didn't want
cripples, you see."

"I wish you wouldn't, Willy."

He had been frightfully sorry then and had comforted her at some length,
but the fact remained.

"And you the very best they've ever had for mixing prescriptions!" she
had said at last. "And a graduate in chemistry!"

"Well," he said, "that's that, and we won't worry about it. There's more
than one way of killing a cat."

"What do you mean, Willy? More than one way?"

There was no light of prophecy in William Wallace Cameron's gray eyes,
however, when he replied: "More than one way of serving my country.
Don't you worry. I'll find something."

So he had, and he had come out of his Red Cross work in the camp with
one or two things in his heart that had not been there before. One was
a knowledge of men. He could not have put into words what he felt about
men. It was something about the fundamental simpl