er when d'Arcy was at the front, if they
belonged to each other. Denin told himself savagely that it would be
brutal to blame the girl. She had a right to love and joy, and she
should have both, unspoiled. He would be damned sooner than snatch
happiness from Barbara, and drag her through the dust of shame, a woman
claimed as wife by two men.

"This decides things for me, then, forever and ever," he thought, a
strange quietness settling down upon him, like a cloud in which a man
is lost on a mountain-top. "She's free as light. John Denin died last
August in France."

CHAPTER IV

But the man in the German hospital did not die. He could not, unless he
put an end to his own life, and to do that had always seemed to Denin
an act of cowardice and weakness. He remembered reading as a boy, how
Plato said that men were "prisoners of the gods" and had no right to
run away from fate. For some reason those words had made a deep imprint
upon his mind at the time, and the impression remained. His soul dwelt
in his body as a prisoner of the gods, a prisoner on parole.

Life--mere physical life--rose again in his veins as the days went on,
rose in a strong current, as the sap rises in trees when winter changes
to spring. He was discharged from the hospital as cured, and interned
in a concentration camp in Germany not far from the Dutch frontier.
Though he had given his parole to the gods, he would not give it to the
Germans. He meant to escape some day if he could. He limped heavily,
and had not got back the full strength of his once shattered right
hand, so there was no hope of returning to fight under a new name. Had
there been a chance of that, he would have wished to join the French
Foreign Legion, where a man can be of use as a soldier, while lost to
the world. As it was, he made no definite plans, but set about earning
money in order not to be penniless if the day ever came when he could
snatch at freedom.

He had always had a marked talent for quick character-sketches and a
bold kind of portraiture. He could catch a likeness in a moment. With
charcoal he dashed off caricatures of his fellow prisoners, on the
whitewashed wall of the room which he shared with several British
soldiers. The striking cleverness of the sketcher was noticed by the
man in charge who spoke to some one higher in authority; and officers
came to gaze gravely at the curious works of art. Denin had
rechristened himself by this time "John Sanbour