les. He looked haggard
and tired when he came back, but his quiet face held a new resolve.
War had come at last. He would put behind him the selfish craving for
happiness, forget himself. He would not make money out of the nation's
necessity. He would put Audrey out of his mind, if not out of his heart.
He would try to rebuild his house of life along new and better lines.
Perhaps he could bring Natalie to see things as he saw them, as they
were, not as she wanted them to be.

Some times it took great crises to bring out women. Child-bearing did
it, often. Urgent need did it, too. But after all the real test was war.
The big woman met it squarely, took her part of the burden; the small
woman weakened, went down under it, found it a grievance rather than a
grief.

He did not notice Graham's car when it passed him, outside the city
limits, or see Anna Klein's startled eyes as it flashed by.

Graham did not come in until evening. At ten o'clock Clayton found the
second man carrying up-stairs a tray containing whisky and soda, and
before he slept he heard a tap at Graham's door across the hall, and
surmised that he had rung for another. Later still he heard Natalie
cross the hall, and rather loud and angry voices. He considered,
ironically, that a day which had found a part of the nation on its knees
found in his own house only dissension and bitterness.

In the morning, at the office, Joey announced a soldier to see him, and
added, with his customary nonchalance:

"We'll be having a lot of them around now, I expect."

Clayton, glancing up from the visitor's slip in his hand, surprised
something wistful in the boy's eyes.

"Want to go, do you?"

"Give my neck to go--sir." He always added the "sir," when he remembered
it, with the air of throwing a sop to a convention he despised.

"You may yet, you know. This thing is going to last a while. Send him
in, Joey."

He had grown attached to this lad of the streets. He found in his
loyalty a thing he could not buy.

Jackson was his caller. Clayton, who had been rather more familiar with
his back in its gray livery than with any other aspect of him, found him
strange and impressive in khaki.

"I'm sorry I couldn't get here sooner, Mr. Spencer," he explained. "I've
been down on the border. Yuma. I just got a short leave, and came back
to see my family."

He stood very erect, a bronzed and military figure. Suddenly it seemed
strange to Clayton Spencer that this man b