of his weeks of introspection had meant so much to him that in the reaction he had suffered more than he was willing to admit to any one. But Lola at least understood. She, of all the people he knew, would sympathize with it even though the possibility of its realization had long since departed.

"You remember," he said at last, "how we felt when the United States finally entered the war? We were intoxicated with emotional hysteria, and I went overseas with France and Lafayette' as my slogan, and a conviction that I was a member of a mighty crusade. Everything was all right until that bullet struck me. Until then I was an asset to my country and to France; then I became a liability. Lying there on that cot I had a chance to think, and I tell you I thought hard. Instead of being a mighty crusader, I realized that I was only an infinitesimal atom, a cog in that great war machine which rolled backwards and forwards as the tide of battle turned, leaving behind its toll of broken men, of which I was one."

Lola listened to him attentively, but her face assumed the pallor of the Madonna lilies. His words recalled the scenes she had tried hard to forget, his intensity gave them startling vividness.

"When I found that this made me rebellious," Richard continued, "I began to question my real motives. Had I come to fight for France, as I really thought, or was it the adventure that appealed to me, and was my whole relation to the war a selfish one after all?" "But you had risked your life, Dick."

"Wasn't it all part of the emotional hysteria and of

the adventure?" he asked; "but I kept on thinking. Then I began to be afraid that by staying so long in the hospital I should be no good for fighting again. The only thing that kept us going, you know, was the feeling that it was all a great game, with lives instead of goal-posts for counters. Unless we felt that way we couldn't have gone through with it; it was too ghastly. Night after night I woke up covered with sweat, seeing things stripped of their masks in their hideous reality."

Lola placed her hand gently over his. In his suffering she forgot her own, and her sympathy helped him.

"I am so glad you are telling me this," she said quietly. "It will do you good to share it with some one . . . All this was before your vision came to you?"

"Yes. I came out of this phase and passed into the third stage. That was when I asked myself what it was all for. Here were thousands of wounded men throughout France lying on cots like mine. There must be something beyond adventure which had attracted them and had given them the impulse to risk their lives... Then I thought I had found the answer."

He turned away from the girl to hide the bitterness in his face.

"It seems so foolish to talk about it now after what you and I have seen since we came home," he added. "Please tell me," Lola begged. "I really want to know."

"All right. I know you won't laugh at me. Here it is as well as I can tell you: At that moment the

war meant to me a release from something which before this had kept me bound. What we were fighting for seemed so big that small things, our lives for instance, assumed their proper relative positions. Death, the greatest event in life, had always before seemed useless; now we had the privilege of meeting it in a manner equal to its greatness. Before that I had been haunted by a fear of what the future might do for me, and this, of course, placed a hopeless limitation upon my life. At that moment I was freed from any fear of what could happen, for the only thing which counted was the big common cause. I had been on the outside of the world, and at last I became a part of it."

The man paused as if ashamed to have put his thoughts into words. Lola looked at him admiringly.

"Oh, Dick!" she cried, "don't tell me that it is possible to have had such a vision as that and then slip back."

"It is possible, Lola," he answered, with a note so positive in his voice that the girl was shocked; "it not only is possible, but that very thing has happened. I wish we might agree right now never to speak of the war again."

"Do you think we could keep any such agreement?" Lola inquired, struggling to recover from her disappointment.

"Probably not," he admitted, "but I would much rather talk about ourselves."

He looked into her face with an appeal she could not escape.

"Lola," he asked, "when are we going to be married?"

The change of the subject was so abrupt that she started noticeably.

Somehow I

"It seems sacrilegious to think of ourselves, Dick, after what you have just been saying. can't seem to think of marriage

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"I know you can't, and I wonder if you ever will. Since I came home everything I really want seems to be slipping farther and farther away from me. There's a hopelessness about it that keeps me unsettled and apprehensive. You and I have had the same problems, Lola. We haven't been successful in solving them by ourselves, but if we were married. . ."

"Don't urge me against my better judgment, dear,” she pleaded with him. "I don't understand myself. I know that my love for you is deeper, if anything, than when you went away, yet I don't dare trust myself to make you happy until I find out what this change in me really means. Be patient, dear, and everything will come out all right. Some day we will look back at this uncertainty and laugh at our fears."

Richard was distinctly annoyed by her continued postponement, and, man-like, made no attempt to conceal it. He rose abruptly and picked up his hat from the stone table beside them.

"All right," he said with a show of resignation. "I can't force you to marry me, but you must not wonder that I've lost faith in everything. The boys who died over there still believing that their sacrifice accomplished something, are to be envied rather than mourned. They have been spared the awakening that has come to me."

Lola was distressed to see him so wounded, yet she must be true to herself. Her eyes moistened as she looked at him with infinite tenderness, almost motherly in its understanding.

"Don't be hurt, Dick," she pleaded. "We have assumed responsibilities whether we want them or not. You expressed it perfectly when you said that before we were on the outside of the world, and now we have become a part of it. Our happiness can only come if we live up to these new responsibilities."

Richard's disappointment was too real for him to yield his ill-temper, and he turned away with a deprecating shrug of his shoulders.