it; yet the dazed world,
still half blind with blood and smoke, sat helpless and unstirring,
barring no gates to this pestilence that stalked the stricken earth at
noon-day.

New York, partly paralysed by sacrifice and the blood-sucking antics
of half-crazed congressmen, gorged by six years feeding after decades
of starvation, welcomed the incoming soldiers in a bewildered sort of
way, making either an idiot's din of dissonance or gaping in stupid
silence as the huge troop-ships swept up the bay.

The battle fleet arrived--the home squadron and the "6th battle
squadron"--and lay towering along the Hudson, while officers and
jackies swarmed the streets--streets now thronged by wounded,
too--pallid cripples in olive drab, limping along slowly beneath
lowering skies, with their citations and crosses and ribbons and
wound chevrons in glinting gold under the relighted lustres of the
metropolis.

So the false mockery of Christmas came to the city--a forced festival,
unutterably sad, for all that the end of the war was subject of thanks
in every church and synagogue. And so the mystic feast ended, scarcely
heeded amid the slow, half-crippled groping for financial readjustment
in the teeth of a snarling and vindictive Congress, mean in its envy,
meaner in revenge--a domestic brand of sectional Bolsheviki as dirty
and degenerate as any anarchist in all Russia.

The President had sailed away--(_Slava! Slava! Nechevo!_)--and the
newspapers were preparing to tell their disillusioned public all about
it, if permitted.

And so dawned the New Year over the spreading crimson flood, flecking
the mounting tide with brighter scarlet as it crept ever westward,
ever wider, across a wounded world.

* * * * *

Palla had not seen Jim for a very long time now. Christmas passed,
bringing neither gift nor message, although she had sent him a little
remembrance--_The Divine Pantheon_, by an unfrocked Anglican
clergyman, one Loxon Fettars, recently under detention pending
investigation concerning an alleged multiplicity of wives.

The New Year brought no greeting from him, either; nobody she knew had
seen him, and her pride had revolted at writing him after she had
telephoned and left a message at his club--her usual concession after
a stormy parting.

And there was another matter that was causing her a constantly
increasing unrest--she had not seen Marya for many a day.

Quiet grief for what