As Helen came back into the room Mackay ran for her, and locking her in the same embrace — even a tighter one than Swann’s — he fell into the strange steps that had so shocked Lane. Moreover, he was manifestly a skilful dancer, and showed the thin, lithe, supple body of one trained down by this or some other violent exercise.

  Lane did not watch the dancers this time. Again Bessy Bell refused to get up from the lounge. The youth was insistent. He pawed at her. And manifestly she did not like that, for her face flamed, and she snapped: “Stop it — you bonehead! Can’t you see I want to sit here by Mr. Lane?”

  The youth slouched away fuming to himself.

  Whereupon Lane got up, and seated himself beside Bessy so that he need not shout to be heard.

  “That was nice of you, Miss Bell — but rather hard on the youngster,” said Lane.

  “He makes me sick. All he wants to do is lolly-gag.... Besides, after what you said to Helen about the jazz I wouldn’t dance in front of you on a bet.”

  She was forceful, frank, naive. She was impressed by his nearness; but Lane saw that it was the fact of his being a soldier with a record, not his mere physical propinquity that affected her. She seemed both bold and shy. But she did not show any modesty. Her short skirt came above her bare knees, and she did not try to hide them from Lane’s sight. At fifteen, like his sister Lorna, this girl had the development of a young woman. She breathed health, and something elusive that Lane could not catch. If it had not been for her apparent lack of shame, and her rouged lips and cheeks, and her plucked eyebrows, she would have been exceedingly alluring. But no beauty, however striking, could under these circumstances, stir Lane’s heart. He was fascinated, puzzled, intensely curious.

  “Why wouldn’t you dance jazz in front of me?” he inquired, with a smile.

  “Well, for one thing I’m not stuck on it, and for another I’ll say you said a mouthful.”

  “Is that all?” he asked, as if disappointed.

  “No. I’d respect what you said — because of where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”

  It was a reply that surprised Lane.

  “I’m out of date, you know.”

  She put a finger on the medal on his breast and said: “You could never be out of date.”

  The music and the sliding shuffle ceased.

  “Now beat it,” said Helen. “I want to talk to Daren.” She gayly shoved the young people ahead of her in a mass, and called to Bessy: “Here, you kid vamp, lay off Daren.”

  Bessy leaned to whisper in his ear: “Make a date with me, quick!”

  “Surely, I’ll hunt you up. Good-bye.”

  She was the only one who made any pretension of saying good-bye to Lane. They all crowded out before Helen, with Mackay in the rear. From the hall Lane heard him say to Helen: “Dick’ll sure go to the mat with you for this.”

  Presently Helen returned to shut the door behind her; and her walk toward Lane had a suggestion of the oriental dancer. For Lane her face was a study. This seemed a woman beyond his comprehension. She was the Helen Wrapp he had known and loved, plus an age of change, a measureless experience. With that swaying, sinuous, pantherish grace, with her green eyes narrowed and gleaming, half mocking, half serious, she glided up to him, close, closer until she pressed against him, and her face was uplifted under his. Then she waited with her eyes gazing into his. Slumberous green depths, slowly lighting, they seemed to Lane. Her presence thus, her brazen challenge, affected him powerfully, but he had no thrill.

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she asked.

  “Helen, why didn’t you write me you had broken our engagement?” he counter-queried.

  The question disconcerted her somewhat. Drawing back from close contact with him she took hold of his sleeves, and assumed a naive air of groping in memory. She used her eyes in a way that Lane could not associate with the past he knew. She was a flirt — not above trying her arts on the man she had jilted.

  “Why, didn’t I write you? Of course I did.”

  “Well, if you did I never got the letter. And if you were on the level you’d admit you never wrote.”

  “How’d you find out then?” she inquired curiously.

  “I never knew for sure until your mother verified it.”

  “Are you curious to know why I did break it off?”

  “Not in the least.”

  This reply shot the fire into her face, yet she still persisted in the expression of her sentimental motive. She began to finger the medal on his breast.

  “So, Mr. Soldier Hero, you didn’t care?”

  “No — not after I had been here ten minutes,” he replied, bluntly.

  She whirled from him, swiftly, her body instinct with passion, her expression one of surprise and fury.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing I care to explain, except I discovered my love for you was dead — perhaps had been dead for a long time.”

  “But you never discovered it until you saw me — here — with Swann — dancing, drinking, smoking?”

  “No. To be honest, the shock of that enlightened me.”

  “Daren Lane, I’m just what you men have made me,” she burst out, passionately.

  “You are mistaken. I beg to be excluded from any complicity in the — in whatever you’ve been made,” he said, bitterly. “I have been true to you in deed and in thought all this time.”

  “You must be a queer soldier!” she exclaimed, incredulously.

  “I figure there were a couple of million soldiers like me, queer or not,” he retorted.

  She gazed at him with something akin to hate in her eyes. Then putting her hands to her full hips she began that swaying, dancing walk to and fro before the window. She was deeply hurt. Lane had meant to get under her skin with a few just words of scorn, and he had imagined his insinuation as to the change in her had hurt her feelings. Suddenly he divined it was not that at all — he had only wounded her vanity.

  “Helen, let’s not talk of the past,” he said. “It’s over. Even if you had been true to me, and I loved you still — I would have been compelled to break our engagement.”

  “You would! And why?”

  “I am a physical wreck — and a mental one, too, I fear.... Helen, I’ve come home to die.”

  “Daren!” she cried, poignantly.

  Then he told her in brief, brutal words of the wounds and ravages war had dealt him, and what Doctor Bronson’s verdict had been. Lane felt shame in being so little as to want to shock and hurt her, if that were possible.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she burst out. “Your mother — your sister.... Oh, that damned horrible war! What has it not done to us?... Daren, you looked white and weak, but I never thought you were — going to die.... How dreadful!”

  Something of her girlishness returned to her in this moment of sincerity. The past was not wholly dead. Memories lingered. She looked at Lane, wide-eyed, in distress, caught between strange long-forgotten emotions.

  “Helen, it’s not dreadful to have to die,” replied Lane. “That is not the dreadful part in coming home.”

  “What is dreadful, then?” she asked, very low.

  Lane felt a great heave of his breast — the irrepressible reaction of a profound and terrible emotion, always held in abeyance until now. And a fierce pang, that was physical as well as emotional, tore through him. His throat constricted and ached to a familiar sensation — the welling up of blood from his lungs. The handkerchief he put to his lips came away stained red. Helen saw it, and with dilated eyes, moved instinctively as if to touch him, hold him in her pity.

  “Never mind, Helen,” he said, huskily. “That’s nothing.... Well, I was about to tell you what is so dreadful — for me.... It’s to reach home grateful to God I was spared to get home — resigned to the ruin of my life — content to die for whom I fought — my mother, my sister, you, and all our women (for I fought for nothing else) — and find my mother aged and bewildered and sad, my sister a painted little hussy — and you — a strange creature I despise.... And all, everybody, everything changed — changed in some horrible way which proves my sacrifice in vain.... It is not death that is dreadful, but the uselessness, the hopelessness of the ideal I cherished.”

  Helen fell on the couch, and burying her face in the pillows she began to sob. Lane looked down at her, at her glistening auburn hair, and slender, white, ringed hand clutching the cushions, at her lissom shaking form, at the shapely legs in the rolled-down silk stockings — and he felt a melancholy happiness in the proof that he had reached her shallow heart, and in the fact that this was the moment of loss.

  “Good-bye — Helen,” he said.

  “Daren — don’t — go,” she begged.

  But he had to go, for other reasons beside the one that this was the end of all intimate relation between him and Helen. He had overtaxed his strength, and the burning pang in his breast was one he must heed. On the hall stairway a dizzy spell came over him. He held on to the banister until the weakness passed. Fortunately there was no one to observe him. Somehow the sumptuous spacious hall seemed drearily empty. Was this a home for that twenty-year-old girl upstairs? Lane opened the door and went out. He was relieved to find the taxi waiting. To the driver he gave the address of his home and said: “Go slow and don’t give me a jar!”

  But Lane reached home, and got into the house, where he sat at the table with his mother and Lorna, making a pretense of eating, and went upstairs and into his bed without any recurrence of the symptoms that had alarmed him. In the darkness of his room he gradually relaxed to rest. And rest was the only medicine for him. It had put off hour by hour and day by day the inevitable.

  “If it comes — all right — I’m ready,” he whispered to himself. “But in spite of all I’ve been through — and have come home to — I don’t want to die.”

  There was no use in trying to sleep. But in this hour he did not want oblivion. He wanted endless time to think. And slowly, with infinite care and infallible memory, he went over every detail of what he had seen and heard since his arrival home. In the headlong stream of consciousness of the past hours he met with circumstances that he lingered over, and tried to understand, to no avail. Yet when all lay clearly before his mental gaze he felt a sad and tremendous fascination in the spectacle.

  For many weeks he had lived on the fancy of getting home, of being honored and loved, of being given some little meed of praise and gratitude in the short while he had to live. Alas! this fancy had been a dream of his egotism. His old world was gone. There was nothing left. The day of the soldier had passed — until some future need of him stirred the emotions of a selfish people. This new world moved on unmindful, through its travail and incalculable change, to unknown ends. He, Daren Lane, had been left alone on the vast and naked shores of Lethe.

  Lane made not one passionate protest at the injustice of his fate. Labor, agony, war had taught him wisdom and vision. He began to realize that no greater change could there be than this of his mind, his soul. But in the darkness there an irresistible grief assailed him. He wept as never before in all his life. And he tasted the bitter salt of his own tears. He wept for his mother, aged and bowed by trouble, bewildered, ready to give up the struggle — his little sister now forced into erotic girlhood, blind, wilful, bold, on the wrong path, doomed beyond his power or any earthly power — the men he had met, warped by the war, materialistic, lost in the maze of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, dead to chivalry and the honor of women — Mel Iden, strangest and saddest of mysteries — a girl who had been noble, aloof, proud, with a heart of golden fire, now disgraced, ruined, the mother of a war-baby, and yet, strangest of all, not vile, not bad, not lost, but groping like he was down those vast and naked shores of life. He wept for the hard-faced Mrs. Wrapp, whose ideal had been wealth and who had found prosperity bitter ashes at her lips, yet who preserved in this modern maelstrom some sense of its falseness, its baseness. He wept for Helen, playmate of the years never to return, sweetheart of his youth, betrayer of his manhood, the young woman of the present, blase, unsexed, seeking, provocative, all perhaps, as she had said, that men had made her — a travesty on splendid girlhood. He wept for her friends, embodying in them all of their class — for little Bessy Bell, with her exquisite golden beauty, her wonderful smile that was a light of joy — a child of fifteen with character and mind, not yet sullied, not yet wholly victim to the unstable spirit of the day.

  And traveling in this army that seemed to march before Lane’s eyes were the slackers, like Mackay and Swann, representative of that horde of cowards who in one way or another had avoided the service — the young men who put comfort, ease, safety, pleasure before all else — who had no ideal of womanhood — who could not have protected women — who would not fight to save women from the apish Huns — who remained behind to fall in the wreck of the war’s degeneration, and to dance, to drink, to smoke, to ride the women to their debasement.

  And for the first and the last time Lane wept for himself, pitifully as a child lost and helpless, as a strong man facing irreparable loss, as a boy who had dreamed beautiful dreams, who had loved and given and trusted, who had suffered insupportable agonies of body and soul, who had fought like a lion for what he represented to himself, who had killed and killed — and whose reward was change, indifference, betrayal and death.

  That dark hour passed. Lane lay spent in the blackness of his room. His heart had broken. But his spirit was as unquenchable as the fire of the sun. If he had a year, a month, a week, a day longer to live he could never live it untrue to himself. Life had marked him to be a sufferer, a victim. But nothing could kill his soul. And his soul was his faith — something he understood as faith in God or nature or life — in the reason for his being — in his vision of the future.

  How then to spend this last remnant of his life! No one would guess what passed through his lonely soul. No one would care. But out of the suffering that now seemed to give him spirit and wisdom and charity there dawned a longing to help, to save. He would return good for evil. All had failed him, but he would fail no one.

  Then he had a strange intense desire to understand the present. Only a day home — and what colossal enigma! The war had been chaos. Was this its aftermath? Had people been rocked on their foundations? What were they doing — how living — how changing? He would see, and be grateful for a little time to prove his faith. He knew he would find the same thing in others that existed in himself.

  He would help his mother, and cheer her, and try to revive something of hope in her. He would bend a keen and patient eye upon Lorna, and take the place of her father, and be kind, loving, yet blunt to her, and show her the inevitable end of this dancing, dallying road. Perhaps he could influence Helen. He would see the little soldier-worshipping Bessy Bell, and if by talking hours and hours, by telling the whole of his awful experience of war, he could take up some of the time so fraught with peril for her, he would welcome the ordeal of memory. And Mel Iden — how thought of her seemed tinged with strange regret! Once she and he had been dear friends, and because of a falsehood told by Helen that friendship had not been what it might have been. Suppose Mel, instead of Helen, had loved him and been engaged to him! Would he have been jilted and would Mel have been lost? No! It was a subtle thing — that answer of his spirit. It did not agree with Mel Iden’s frank confession.

  It might be difficult, he reflected, to approach Mel. But he would find a way. He would rest a few days — then find where she lived and go to see her. Could he help her? And he had an infinite exaltation in his power to help any one who had suffered. Lane recalled Mel’s pale sweet face, the shadowed eyes, the sad tremulous lips. And this image of her seemed the most lasting of the impressions of the day.

  CHAPTER V

  THE ARBITERS OF social fate in Middleville assembled at Mrs. Maynard’s on a Monday afternoon, presumably to partake of tea. Seldom, however, did they meet without adding zest to the occasion by a pricking down of names.

  Mrs. Wrapp was the leading spirit of this self-appointed tribunal — a circumstance of expanding, resentment to Mrs. Maynard, who had once held the reins with aristocratic hands. Mrs. Kingsley, the third member of the great triangle, claimed an ancestor on the Mayflower, which was in her estimation a guerdon of blue blood. Her elaborate and exclusive entertainments could never be rivalled by those of Mrs. Wrapp. She was a widow with one child, the daughter Elinor, a girl of nineteen.

  Mrs. Maynard was tall, pale, and worldly. Traces of lost beauty flashed in her rare smiles. When Frank Maynard had failed in business she had shrouded her soul in bitterness; and she saw the slow cruel years whiten his head and bend his shoulders with the cold eye of a woman who had no forgiveness for failure. After Mr. Maynard’s reverse, all that kept the pair together were the son Blair, and the sweet, fair-haired, delicate Margaret, a girl of eighteen, whom the father loved, and for whom the mother had large ambitions. They still managed, in ways mysterious to the curious, to keep their fine residence in the River Park suburb of Middleville.

  On this April afternoon the tea was neglected in the cups, and there was nothing of the usual mild gossip. The discussion involved Daren Lane, and when two of those social arbiters settled back in their chairs the open sesame of Middleville’s select affairs had been denied to him.

  “Why did he do it?” asked Mrs. Kingsley.

  “He must have been under the influence of liquor,” replied Mrs. Maynard, who had her own reasons for being relieved at the disgrace of Daren Lane.

  “No, Jane, you’re wrong,” spoke up Mrs. Wrapp, who, whatever else she might be, was blunt and fair-minded. “Lane wasn’t drunk. He never drank before the war. I knew him well. He and Helen had a puppy-love affair — they were engaged before Lane went to war. Well, the day after his return he called on us. And if I never liked him before I liked him then. He’s come back to die! He was ill for two weeks — and then he crawled out of bed again. I met him down town one day. He really looked better, and told me with a sad smile that he had ‘his ups and downs’.... No, Lane wasn’t drunk at Fanchon Smith’s dance the other night. I was there, and I was with Mrs. Smith when Lane came up to us. If ever I saw a cool, smooth, handsome devil it was Lane.... Well, he said what he said. I thought Mrs. Smith would faint. It is my idea Lane had a deep motive back of his remark about Fanchon’s dress and her dancing. The fact is Lane was sick at what he saw — sick and angry. And he wanted Fanchon’s mother and me to know what he thought.”