ey were married.
I was in such sympathy with him that I tried to believe it true,
although I knew Helen as only a younger brother can know a sister. I
knew that she had been pampered and petted ever since she was a child;
that she had never shown much affection for father and mother, who were
her slaves, while toward me, who had insulted and made fun of her, she
was almost effusive. With this in mind, I had urged Jim to neglect
her, to "treat her rough," but when a man is head-over-heels in love
with a girl, what's the good of advice? To tell him to mistreat her
was like telling a Mohammedan to spit in the face of the prophet.

They had been married a little over a year when Frank Woods came to
Eastbrook on war business for the French Government. He had been in
Papa Joffre's Army during part of the melee, wore the _Croix de Guerre_
with several palms, and could hold a company of people enthralled with
stories of his experiences. Whether he had a right to the decorations,
or even the uniform, no one was quite sure, but it set off every good
point of his massive, well-built frame. He would stand in front of the
fire and tell of air-scraps in such a way that, while he never
mentioned the hero by name, it was easy to guess that "hero" and Frank
Woods were synonymous. He could dance, ride, play any game and shoot
better than the best of us, and when he sat at the piano and sang,
every man looked at his wife or his fiancee and wondered where the
lightning was going to strike. For although he was a very proper young
bachelor for months, showing no unseemly interest in women, we all of
us, I think, secretly felt that he was setting the stage for a "grand
coup."

If he had singled out Helen from the first, he couldn't have played his
game better, for his seeming indifference to her loveliness piqued her
almost to madness. During the early months of our entrance in the war
he was called back to France, and every man in Eastbrook breathed a
sigh of relief. There wasn't one of us who could say why we thought
him a cad, but just the same, I doubt if there was a father in
Eastbrook who would willingly have given his daughter to him. He was
too much of the ideal lover to make a good husband. There was
something about him, too, that made no man want to claim him as a
particular friend, but perhaps it was because we were all jealous.

While most of the younger men of the town were in France, or, like Jim
and myself, in a