most magic suddenness. Yet he saw little
of anything beyond a girl's look of horror, heard nothing but her
outraged words. Scarcely knowing it he hurdled prostrate figures,
stumbled into craters, tripped on vagrant ends of wire entanglements,
till at last, through sheer exhaustion, he fell face down amidst a small
group of the dead.

His maddened race had taken him close to the scene of battle; indeed, he
had crossed the old first and second German trenches without observing
them, so completely demolished had they been by the French _barrage_.
The fighting was yet somewhere beyond, although not waged with anything
like the intensity of an hour ago. The artillery had almost entirely
ceased, and the lesser rattle of machine-guns was diminishing. Yet he
listened, trying to locate the thickest part of it, intending to push
there as soon as he regained his breath; but always just above the
noises came Marian's burning words, and for awhile he lay with tightly
closed eyes, letting them beat upon him as blows.

Gradually, as his breathing grew more normal, other words mingled with
hers in a kind of verbal potpourri--jumbled and unmeaning, yet soon
getting clear of the confusion and sounding in his ears like a clarion
voice:

"When man calls on the highest expression of his will, he becomes
indomitable; he succeeds in the highest terms of success--and thus will
you succeed, _mon pauvre enfant_!"

He thought this over with a sense of comfort. It _would_ feel good to
become indomitable, to succeed in the highest terms of success! Had he
ever stopped, and with solemn deliberation called upon the highest
expression of his will? He tried to remember. Surely he had given no
thought to will power when tossed into the ocean from the sinking
ship--nor at any time since coming to this battle front! Each day, from
the historic Sixth of April even unto the present minute, he unsparingly
admitted, had been spent by him amidst concocted fears and magnified
dangers; but never once had he buried his teeth in a single manly
purpose, as Tim might have expressed it. This brought Tim to mind, and
the many sane things he had said aboard ship. Then another voice,
enriched not alone by affection but by the pride of age as it had
spoken 'way back yonder in the Hillsdale _Eagle_ office:

"I want to be proud of you," it now said calmly. "You're going out to
play a mighty big game, boy, wherein Humanity is trumps, and Patriotism,
Righteousness and