ble of guns.

He saw himself on his first leave in London, when he found that Myra
was growing less restive under his absence, when he felt proud to
think that she was learning the lesson of sacrifice and how to bear up
under it. He saw his second Channel crossing with a flesh wound in his
thigh, when there seemed to his hyper-sensitive mind a faint
perfunctoriness in her greeting. It was on this leave that he first
realized how the grim business he was engaged upon was somehow rearing
an impalpable wall between himself and this woman whom he still loved
with a lover's passion after four years of marriage.

And he could see, in this mental cinema, whole searing sentences of
the letter he received from her just before a big push on the Somme
in the fall of '17--that letter in which she told him with child-like
directness that he had grown dim and distant and that she loved
another man. She was sure he would not care greatly. She was sorry if
he did. But she could not help it. She had been so lonely. People were
bound to change. It couldn't be helped. She was sorry--but--

And Hollister saw himself later lying just outside the lip of a
shell-crater, blind, helpless, his face a shredded smear when he felt
it with groping fingers. He remembered that he lay there wondering,
because of the darkness and the strange silence and the pain, if he
were dead and burning in hell for his sins.

After that there were visions of himself in a German hospital, in a
prison camp, and at last the armistice, and the Channel crossing once
more. He was dead, they told him, when he tried in the chaos of
demobilization to get in touch with his regiment, to establish his
identity, to find his wife. He was officially dead. He had been so
reported, so accepted eighteen months earlier. His wife had married
again. She and her husband had vanished from England. And with his
wife had vanished his assets, his estate, by virtue of a pre-war
arrangement which he had never revoked.

He beheld himself upon the streets of London, one of innumerable stray
dogs, ruined, deserted, disfigured, a bit of war's wreckage. He did
not particularly consider himself a victim of injustice. He did not
blame Myra. He was simply numbed and bewildered.

But that was before he grew conscious of what it meant to a sensitive
man, a man in whom all warm human impulses flowed so strongly, to be
penniless, to have all the dependable foundations of his life torn
from under hi