a mandolin was wailing about the
long, long trail.

His mother watched him anxiously. He was thinner than ever, and oddly
older, and there was a hollow look about his eyes that hurt her.

"Why don't you bring home a bottle of tonic from the store, Willy," she
said, one evening when he had been feverishly running through the city
newspaper. He put the paper aside hastily.

"Tonic!" he said. "Why, I'm all right, mother. Anyhow, I wouldn't take
any of that stuff." He caught her eye and looked away. "It takes a
little time to get settled again, that's all, mother."

"The Young People's Society is having an entertainment at the church
to-night, Willy."

"Well, maybe I'll go," he agreed to her unspoken suggestion. "If you
insist on making me a society man--"

But some time later he came downstairs with a book.

"Thought I'd rather read," he explained. "Got a book here on the history
of steel. Talk about romances! Let me read some of it to you. You sit
there and close your eyes and just listen to this: 'The first Cardew
furnace was built in 1868. At that time--'"

Some time later he glanced up. His mother was quietly sleeping, her
hands folded in her lap. He closed the book and sat there, fighting
again his patient battle with himself. The book on his knee seemed to
symbolize the gulf between Lily Cardew and himself. But the real gulf,
the unbridgeable chasm, between Lily and himself, was neither social nor
financial.

"As if that counted, in America," he reflected scornfully.

No. It was not that. The war had temporarily broken down the old social
barriers. Some of them would never be erected again, although it was the
tendency of civilization for men to divide themselves, rather than to
be divided, into the high, the middle and the low. But in his generation
young Cameron knew that there would be no uncrossable bridge between old
Anthony's granddaughter and himself, were it not for one thing.

She did not love him. It hurt his pride to realize that she had never
thought of him in any terms but that of a pleasant comradeship. Hardly
even as a man. Men fought, in war time. They did not fry doughnuts and
write letters home for the illiterate. Any one of those boys in the
ranks was a better man than he was. All this talk about a man's soul
being greater than his body, that was rot. A man was as good as the
weakest part of him, and no more.

His sensitive face in the lamplight was etched with lines of tragedy.
He