sly enough, who seemed trying to tell
him, trying to warn him to keep his mouth shut. Then the house was
visible through the trees. He raised his stick.

"I wanted to see it again," he said, defiantly, "because I was born
there. I lived there."

She paused and stared with him, without saying anything, without any
change of expression. After a time she turned.

"Have you looked enough? Shall we go back, George?"

He nodded, glancing at her wonderingly. After all, he had had very
little love in his life. Mrs. Bailly, Betty----

He had never dreamed of such gratitude as this. Lambert, home with his
war madness fresh upon him, must have told her, as an example of what a
man might do. But was her action all gratitude? Rather wasn't it a
signpost at the parting of two ages?

If that were so, he told himself, the world had left Sylvia hopelessly
behind.

II

The memory of that unguarded moment remained in his mind uncomfortably.
He carried it finally from the hospital to his musty apartment, where he
stripped off his uniform and looked in the glass, for the first time in
nearly two years his own master, no man's servant.

Was he his own master as long as he could commit such sentimental
follies, as long as he could suspect that he had told Wandel the truth
on the Vesle? This nostalgia must be the rebound from the war, of which
he had heard so much, which made men weak, or lazy, or indifferent.

He continued to stare in the glass, angry, amazed. He had to overcome
this homesick feeling. He had to prepare himself for harder battles than
he had ever fought. He had had plenty of warning of the selfishness that
was creeping over the world like a black pestilence. Where was his own
self-will that had carried him so far?

He locked himself, as it were, in his apartment. He sat down and called
on his will. With a systematic brutality he got himself in hand. He
reviewed his aims: to make more money, to get Sylvia. He emerged at
last, hard and uncompromising, ready for the selfish ones, and went down
town. Blodgett greeted him with a cheer.

"Miracles! For the first time since you got back you look yourself
again."

"I am," George answered, "all but the limp. That will go some day
maybe."

He wanted it to go. He desired enormously to rid himself of the last
reminder of his service.

Lambert was definitely caught by the marble temple, but Goodhue and he
would stay together, more or less tied to Blodgett, to accept t