s feet, to be so disfigured that people shunned him.

He had to gather up the broken pieces of his life, fit them together,
go on as best he could. It did not occur to him at first to do
otherwise, or that the doing would be hard. He had not foreseen all
the strange shifts he would be put to, the humiliations he would
suffer, the crushing weight of hopelessness which gathered upon him by
the time he arrived on the Pacific Coast, where he had once lived, to
which he now turned to do as men all over the war-racked earth were
doing in the winter of 1919,--cast about in an effort to adjust
himself, to make a place for himself in civil life.

All the way across the continent of North America Hollister grew more
and more restive under the accumulating knowledge that the horrible
devastation of his features made a No Man's Land about him which few
had the courage to cross. It was a fact. Here, upon the evening of the
third day in Vancouver, a blind and indescribable fear seized upon
him, a sickening conviction that although living, he was dead,--dead
in so far as the common, casual intimacies of daily intercourse with
his fellows went. It was as if men and women were universally
repulsed by that grotesquely distorted mask which served him for a
face, as if at sight of it by common impulse they made off, withdrew
to a safe distance, as they would withdraw from any loathsome thing.

Lying on his bed, Hollister flexed his arms. He arched his chest and
fingered the muscular breadth of it in the darkness. Bodily, he was a
perfect man. Strength flowed through him in continuous waves. He could
feel within himself the surge of vast stores of energy. His brain
functioned with a bright, bitter clearness. He could feel,--ah, that
was the hell of it. That quivering response to the subtle nuances of
thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the
man, was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of
tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his
cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as he
had always been.

For a moment there came over him the wild impulse to rush out into the
street, crying:

"You fools! Because my face is torn and twisted makes me no different
from you. I still feel and think. I am as able to love and hate as
you. Was all your talk about honorable scars just prattle to mislead
the men who risked the scars? Is all your much advertised ki