"Henry Cross!" The gentle spouse gave evidence of being annoyed. "It isn't Christian for you to aggravate us like this. Don't you agree with me, sister?" "What is the use of agreeing?" Sarah asked with resignation. "You know Henry."

"Well," he said slowly, "it isn't any secret as I know of, but I haven't much to tell... yet. I am going over to call on James Norton after supper."

"Henry Cross!" Martha ejaculated, and then subsided into inarticulate suspense.

The thrill had come. If Henry Cross had anticipated the pleasure of creating a dramatic moment he could ask for nothing more. Martha looked at Sarah and Sarah looked at Martha, while both looked at Henry, and the silence was filled with tense excitement. Henry tried to appear unconcerned as he ate his beans, but his enjoyment of the situation was far greater than his gastronomic satisfaction.

There are few shocks, however violent, from which those affected do not ultimately recover. At length

Sarah found her voice.

"Has James Norton invited you without including us?"

"Oh, no; nothing social . . . nothing social," he hastened to reassure his sister.

"Are you going to James Norton's house of your own free will?" Martha demanded incredulously.

"Yes," Henry acknowledged; "I am. As a matter of fact, Norton doesn't know I'm coming."

"Merciful man!"

This was the most extravagant expression of profanity ever heard in the Cross household, and its use evidenced the high moral tension.

"You don't mean to say that you are going to make up with that . . . that . . .”

...

...

"Don't get excited," Henry interrupted soothingly. "Didn't the minister in his sermon yesterday tell us to forgive our enemies ?"

"That was a quotation from the Scriptures, Henry Cross, and you know it. The Scriptures were written long before James Norton was born or there would have been a special exception made to cover his case."

"Why, Martha!" Henry thoroughly enjoyed his wife's wrath when directed against his rival, and proceeded to encourage it. "What has James Norton ever done to get you so down on him?"

"Done? You ask me what he's done when there hasn't been a day these last twenty years I haven't heard you say something mean against him! And now you're going to make up with him after all these years of hating him! If you hadn't been a Christian all your life, Henry Cross, I'd say you were getting a sudden experience of religion and an awful dose of it!"

Sarah had been watching her brother's face and was able to detect what Martha's excitement had caused her to overlook.

"Can't you see he's making sport of you, Martha? Henry Cross never flopped like that in all his natural life."

"Then he has no right to treat me like a child.”

Martha's eyes filled with tears of mortification.

"There, there," her husband soothed her; "everybody has to have his little joke. I have an idea that my call will cause Mr. James Norton the utmost astonishment."

"I should think it might," Martha dried her tears; "it certainly has me. Why don't you tell us all

about it?"

"Never like to count my chickens before they're hatched, but I will tell you this, Martha, . ." Henry Cross's face hardened as his wife had seldom seen it before,.. "I've got James Norton now where I can handle him, and it has taken me twenty years to do it!"

CHAPTER XII

R

I

ICHARD was waylaid by Barry as he was leav

ing the house. What Lola had told him about

the contentment her protegé had found gave Dick a new interest in him. Until then he had looked upon the one-legged man as a bit of flotsam cast up by the war, more fortunate than most because he had fallen among sympathetic and understanding friends, but still a pitiable object because necessarily the recipient of charity.

Nothing so exasperated Richard or caused so severe a shock to his patriotism as the failure of his own government to provide promptly and efficiently for the care of those who had given themselves to their country's service. No other nation proved itself so liberal in its provisions for the disabled soldiers; no other nation, through legislative and administrative deficiencies, so failed to make those provisions available. It seemed incredible to Richard that an intelligent government should fail to appreciate the fact that in the rehabilitation of the disabled soldier the three important needs. . . medical treatment, vocational training, and financial support were the simultaneous neces

...

sities of one man and not of three different men, or of one man at three different times. The lack of vision and foresight in our preparation seemed indefensible to him when we had before us the experience of other nations, and of our own nation in previous wars. The delayed start made by our government and its lack of conception of the magnitude of the problem, resulting in so much unnecessary suffering for the disabled veterans, appeared to Richard as nothing less than criminal, and he was eager to call some one strictly to account.

Richard was among the leaders in the American Legion to force home to a government clogged by red tape, administrative chaos, duplication, and wasted energy and conflict, the fact that thousands of these men were waiting and had been waiting for months for compensation for their injuries; that other thousands had waited at least as long for an opportunity to reestablish themselves as sustaining members of society by vocational training; that still other thousands were in need of hospital care with no hospital facilities available; that afflicted and penniless veterans had been driven to refuge in almshouses and jails; that hundreds were still the unwilling objects of public and private charity.

To find one of these men, like Barry, who had been able to rise above the supineness of governmental delay and work out his own individual solution, was an event of no little interest to Richard. Lola had told him how all bitterness had disappeared, and that Barry O'Carolan's experiences had really made of him a phil