er.

"Fibs, fibs, fibs," she observed. "Can't conceive why he should want it!
As if you weren't perfectly aware that he will wear it next his heart
and--Oh, don't put it in THAT pocket! I said next your heart, and that
isn't on your RIGHT side."

Albert took the photograph home and stuck it between the frame and glass
of his bureau. Then came a sudden remembrance of his parting with Helen
and with it a twinge of conscience. He had begged her to have nothing
to do with any other fellow. True she had refused to promise and
consequently he also was unbound, but that made no difference--should
not make any. So he put the photograph at the back of the drawer where
he kept his collars and ties, with a resolve never to look at it. He did
not look at it--very often.

Then came another long winter. He ground away at the bookkeeping--he was
more proficient at it, but he hated it as heartily as ever--and wrote
a good deal of verse and some prose. For the first time he sold a prose
article, a short story, to a minor magazine. He wrote long letters to
Helen and she replied. She was studying hard, she liked her work, and
she had been offered the opportunity to tutor in a girls' summer camp in
Vermont during July and August and meant to accept provided her father's
health continued good. Albert protested violently against her being
absent from South Harniss for so long. "You will scarcely be home at
all," he wrote. "I shall hardly see you. What am I going to do? As it
is now I miss you--" and so on for four closely written pages. Having
gotten into the spirit of composition he, so to speak, gloried in his
loneliness, so much so that Helen was moved to remonstrate. "Your letter
made me almost miserable," she wrote, "until I had read it over twice.
Then I began to suspect that you were enjoying your wretchedness,
or enjoying writing about it. I truly don't believe anyone--you
especially--could be quite as lonesome as all that. Honestly now,
Albert, weren't you exaggerating a little? I rather think you were?"

He had been, of course, but it irritated him to think that she
recognized the fact. She had an uncanny faculty of seeing through his
every pretense. In his next letter he said nothing whatever about being
lonesome.

At home, and at the office, the war was what people talked about most
of the time. Since the Lusitania's sinking Captain Zelotes had been a
battle charger chafing at the bit. He wanted to fight and to fight at
onc