other offenses and altogether the young doctor
was ill to live with during those harrassed January days.

It was not only Ruth. Larry could not take Ted's going with the quiet
fortitude with which his uncle met it. Those early weeks of nineteen
hundred and seventeen were black ones for many. The grim Moloch War
demanded more and ever more victims. Thousands of gay, brave, high
spirited lads like Ted were mown down daily by shrapnel and machine gun
or sent twisted and writhing to still more hideous death in the
unspeakable horror of noxious gases. It was all so unnecessary--so
senseless. Larry Holiday whose life was dedicated to the healing and
saving of men's bodies hated with bitter hate this opposing force which
was all for destruction and which held the groaning world in its
relentless grip. It would not have been so bad he thought if the Moloch
would have been content to take merely the old, the life weary, the
diseased, the vile. Not so. It demanded the young, the strong, the clean
and gallant hearted, took their bodies, maimed and tortured them, killed
them sooner or later, hurled them undiscriminatingly into the bottomless
pit of death.

To Larry it all came back to Ted. Ted was the embodiment, the symbol of
the rest. He was the young, the strong, the clean and gallant
hearted--the youth of the world, a vain sacrifice to the cruel blindness
of a so called civilization which would not learn the futility of war and
all the ways of war.

So while Ruth bought pretty clothes and basked in happy anticipations
which for her took the place of memories, poor Larry walked in dark
places and saw no single ray of light.

One afternoon he was summoned to the telephone to receive the word that
there was a telegram for him at the office. It was Dunbury's informal
habit to telephone messages of this sort to the recipient instead of
delivering them in person. Larry took the repeated word in silence. A
question evidently followed from the other end.

"Yes, I got it," Larry snapped back and threw the receiver back in place
with vicious energy. His uncle who had happened to be near looked up to
ask a question but the young doctor was already out of the room leaving
only the slam of the door in his wake. A few moments later the older man
saw the younger start off down the Hill in the car at a speed which was
not unlike Ted's at his worst before the smash on the Florence road.
Evidently Larry was on the war path. Why?

The aft