can.'

She looked at him with unseeing eyes. He paused a moment, then turned
and left her, slipping away into the shadows, one of a world of shadows,
leaving those two alone together, as, for her, they had been alone
together through all the long night.

She looked down into her lap, and made a shield of her two hands, and
muttered:

'Tommy--Tommy.'

CHAPTER XI

THE ETERNAL ROADS

'We are the creatures of birth, of ancestry, of circumstance;
we are surrounded by law, physical and psychical.... The ways
are dark, and the grey years bring a mysterious future which we
cannot see.'--J. H. SHORTHOUSE.

'The law of the past cannot be eluded,
The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,
The law of the living cannot be eluded--it is eternal.'

WALT WHITMAN.

There was peace in Naples, and sunshine breaking at last through
clouds--rest and brightness following days of fear. It remained to put
things together--all the broken things, human and otherwise. The city
was full of those who reached hopeless hands for prop and support,
having lost everything; full of those who gathered closely to them the
fragments that remained, fragments they had snatched from ruin and
clutched in their arms as they fled.

On the many dead, the many broken and dying, the many who grasped
fragments, the many who had lost all, the clear sun looked down, on this
13th of April, with its gay, lucid light. It seemed to hold a promise,
to mention a hope far off. It seemed to drag the world out of the dark
pit, to give the task of rehabilitation and reconstruction the air, not
of a far dream, but of a possibility--far too. It gave it also the air,
quite definitely, of a necessity. It was like the first youth of the
spring, with its forgetting of the black storms past, its promise of a
brave renewal.

Betty Crevequer walked home through the sunny streets from the hospital.
The gay sun had lit the long ward, sending dusty beams across the room
to the broken, bandaged figures in the beds. By the side of one of the
broken, bandaged figures Betty had sat and talked, and Tommy had talked
too, to-day for the first time--talked for the first time, that is, in
the Crevequers' generous sense of that elastic word.

Betty had for four days known that Tommy would not die, but live; now
the sunshine in the streets brought her to a more vivid realization of
it. The sunshine in the streets, the keen smell of