to thwart Richard Swann--to give Margaret the chance
for happiness and love her heart craved--to put out of Lorna's way the
evil influence that had threatened her. Now the solution came to him.
Sooner or later he would catch Swann with his sister in an automobile,
or at the club rooms, or at some other questionable place. He knew
Lorna was meeting Swann. He had tried to find them, all to no avail.
What he might have done heretofore was no longer significant; he knew
what he meant to do now.

But all at once Lane was confronted with remembrance of another thing
he had resolved upon--equally as strong as his determination to save
Lorna--and it was his intention to persuade Mel Iden to marry him.

He loved his sister, but not as he loved Mel Iden. Whatever had
happened to Lorna or might happen, she would be equal to it. She had
the boldness, the cool, calculating selfishness of the general run of
modern girls. Her reactions were vastly different front Mel Iden's.
Lane had lost hope of saving Lorna's soul. He meant only to remove a
baneful power from her path, so that she might lean to the boy who
wanted to marry her. When in his sinister intent he divined the
passionate hate of the soldier for the slacker he refused to listen to
his conscience. The way out in Lorna's case he had discovered. But
what relation had this new factor of his dilemma to Mel Iden? He could
never marry her after he had killed Swann.

Lane went to bed, and when he rested his spent body, he pondered over
every phase of the case. Reason and intelligence had their say. He
knew he had become morbid, sick, rancorous, base, obsessed with this
iniquity and his passion to stamp on it, as if it were a venomous
serpent. He would have liked to do some magnificent and awful deed,
that would show this little, narrow, sordid world at home the truth,
and burn forever on their memories the spirit of a soldier. He had
made a sacrifice that few understood. He had no reward except a
consciousness that grew more luminous and glorious in its lonely light
as time went on. He had endured the uttermost agonies of hell, a
thousand times worse than death, and he had come home with love, with
his faith still true. To what had he returned?

No need for reason or intelligence to knock at the gates of his
passion! The war had left havoc. The physical, the sensual, the
violent, the simian--these instincts, engendering the Day of the
Beast, had come to dominate the people he ha