r. They
made frantic, useless rushes at the closed and barred door. Except
Cecil, all were standing. They were herded like cattle, and there
was no room to lie or sit.

He lay there, drugged by weakness. He felt quite sure that he was
dying, and death was not so bad. He voiced this feebly to the man
who stood over him.

"It's not so bad," he said.

"The hell it's not!" said the man.

For the time Edith was effaced from his mind. He remembered the
wounded men left in the cellar with the building burning over them.
That, and days at home, long before the war.

Once he said "Mother." The soldier who was now standing astride of
him, the better to keep off the crowding men, thought he was asking
for water again.

Thirty hours of that, and then air and a little water. Not enough
water. Not all the water in all the cool streams of the earth would
have slaked the thirst of his wound.

The boy was impassive. He was living in the past. One day he recited
at great length the story of his medals. No one listened.

And all the time his right arm lay or hung, as he was prone or
erect, a strange right arm that did not belong to him. It did not
even swell. When he touched it the fingers were cold and bluish. It
felt like a dead hand.

Then, at the end of it all, was a bed, and a woman's voice, and
quiet.

The woman was large and elderly, and her eyes were very kind. She
stirred something in the boy that had been dead of pain.

"Edith!" he said.

VI

Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole
Edith's former recklessness, and added to it something of her own
dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and
never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best
had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the
string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.

On the opening night the brass notes of the orchestra blared and
shrieked. Mabel's bare feet flew, her loose hair, cut to her ears
and held only by a band over her forehead, kept time in ecstatic
little jerks. When at last she pulled off the fillet and bowed to
the applause, her thick short hair fell over her face as she jerked
her head forward. They liked that. It savoured of the abandoned. She
shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her
scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish
body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its