le man's countenance.

He shuddered and dropped his eyes. This was a trial he seldom ventured
upon. He could not bear that vision long. No one could. That was the
fearful implication which made him shrink. He, Robert Hollister, in
the flush of manhood, with a body whose symmetry and vigor other men
had envied, a mind that functioned alertly, a spirit as nearly
indomitable as the spirit of man may be, was like a leper among his
own kind; he had become a something that filled other men with pitying
dismay when they looked at him, that made women avert their gaze and
withdraw from him in spite of pity.

Hollister snapped out the light and threw himself on his bed. He had
known physical suffering, the slow, aching hours of tortured flesh,
bodily pain that racked him until he had wished for death as a welcome
relief. But that had been when the flame of vitality burned low, when
the will-to-live had been sapped by bodily stress.

Now the mere animal instinct to live was a compelling force within
him. He was young and strong, aching with his desire for life in its
fullest sense. And he did not know how he was going to live and endure
the manner of life he had to face, a life that held nothing but
frustration and denial of all that was necessary to him, which was
making him suffer as acutely as he had ever suffered in the field,
under the knives of callous surgeons, in the shambles of the front
line or the ether-scented dressing stations. There is morphine for a
tortured body, but there is no opiate for agony of the spirit, the
sharp-toothed pain that stabs at a lonely heart with its invisible
lancet.

In the darkness of his room, with all the noisy traffic of a seaport
city rumbling under his windows, Hollister lay on his bed and
struggled against that terrifying depression which had seized him,
that spiritual panic. It was real. It was based upon undeniable
reality. He was no more captain of his soul than any man born of woman
has ever been when he descends into the dark places. But he knew that
he must shake off that feeling, or go mad, or kill himself. One of the
three. He had known men to kill themselves for less. He had seen
wounded men beg for a weapon to end their pain. He had known men who,
after months of convalescence, quitted by their own hand a life that
no longer held anything for them.

And it was not because life held out any promise to Hollister that he
lived, nor was it a physical, fear of death, nor any