. "I was a happy-go-lucky kid before
that. Rich and poor looked alike to me. I didn't covet anything that
anybody had, and I didn't dream that any one could possibly wish to take
away from me anything that I happened to have. I thought the world was a
kind and pleasant place for everybody. But things look a little
different to me now. They sent us fellows to France to fight Huns. But
there are a few at home, I find. Why shouldn't I fight them whenever I
see a chance?"

"But _I'm_ not a Hun," Betty said with a smile.

"I'm not so sure about that."

The words leaped out before he was quite aware of what they might imply.
They had come to a point on the path directly in front of his house.
Betty stopped. Her gray eyes flashed angrily. Storm signals blazed in
her cheeks, bright above the delicate white of her neck.

"Jack MacRae," she burst out hotly, "you are a--a--a first-class idiot!"

Then she turned her back on him and went off up the path with a quick,
springy step that somehow suggested extreme haste.

MacRae stood looking after her fully a minute. Then he climbed the
steps, went into the front room and sat himself down in a deep,
cushioned chair. He glowered into the fireplace with a look as black as
the charred remains of his morning fire. He uttered one brief word after
a long period of fixed staring.

"Damn!" he said.

It seemed a very inadequate manner of expressing his feelings, but it
was the best he could do at the moment.

He sat there until the chill discomfort of the room stirred him out of
his abstraction. Then he built a fire and took up a book to read. But
the book presently lay unheeded on his knees. He passed the rest of the
short forenoon sprawled in that big chair before the fireplace,
struggling with chaotic mental processes.

It made him unhappy, but he could not help it. A tremendous assortment
of mental images presented themselves for inspection, flickering up
unbidden out of his brain-stuff,--old visions and new, familiar things
and vague, troublesome possibilities, all strangely jumbled together.
His mind hopped from Squitty Cove to Salisbury Plain, to the valley of
the Rhone, to Paris, London, Vancouver, turned up all sorts of
recollections, cameralike flashes of things that had happened to him,
things he had seen in curious places, bits of his life in that somehow
distant period when he was a youngster chumming about with his father.
And always he came back to the Gowers,--father