ut grave, even fearful, as if she had faced the
camera full of apprehension. But I knew her not; the thing had come to
me by chance, and I threw it aside to be forgotten.

It is best to tell quickly that those years were swift and full. Early
in the second a letter from Solon, read at a random camp-fire, told me
of my namesake's coming. For the other years I pleased myself
prodigiously by remembering that she must speak my name openly to her
first-born. And I lusted for battle, then. I was an early Norseman, and
I would escape the prosaic bed-death, since, for those dying thus, Held
waited in her chill prison-house below, with hunger her dish, starvation
her knife, care her bed, and anguish her curtains. To survive for easy
death, long deferred, perhaps, I should have my empty dish and bed of
care at once. Lacking the battle death, I could at least mimic it, as
they did of old, that Odin's choosers of the slain might lead me to
Valhalla. There should I forever fight at dawn and be healed at noon, if
wounded, to be ready for the feast and song. The world was not big
enough for us two if we must stay apart. Life was not to be lived in a
beggarly and ignoble compromise. War was its business, bravery its duty,
and cowardice its greatest crime--above all, that ultimate, puling
cowardice of accepting life empty for its own barren sake.

At the last I lay on a cot in a field hospital, entertained for the
moment by the novelty of that vacant, spacious feeling on my left
side--wondering if I could shave now with one arm--without another hand
to pull my face into hard little hummocks for the razor.

I heard the soft quick tread of a hospital steward, and standing before
me, he took from its envelope the letter Solon Denney had sent me to say
that she was dead. I handed it back, told him to burn it, and I shut my
eyes to the sickening shapes of life. My fever came up again, and in the
night I felt inch by inch over ground wet with blood for a picture I had
relinquished in a Quixotic moment. I must have been troublesome, for
they gave me the drug of dreams and I awakened peacefully. I watched the
field surgeons gather about a young line officer brought in with a shot
through his neck. For the better probing of the wound they removed his
head and gave it to me to hold. Seeing that it was Solon Denney's head,
I was seized with a mood of jest--I would hide it and make Solon search.
I advanced craftily down an endless corridor, but ca