"When the nights were dark and we were lying in the third-line trenches, looking up at the stars, I would think of the talks we'd had while I was here, when we would wonder what it was all for and why we were in the thick of it. I've found out, Miss Garing." His voice rose exultingly. "I've pieced together the bits the other chaps told me, and I've thought and thought for myself. And I've got it this way: War's the crucible to get the gold out of us. I don't mean out of the fellows who sit over there on Downing Street. I mean us, the chaps who lie in the mud, and who get caught in the barbed wire, and who make the rushes under the fire of big guns. We were pretty ordinary men when we came here to France, weren't we? We were thinking of our three meals a day, and the thrill of the fighting, and the glory of going home with medals on. Well, we aren't thinking so much now of those things. You can't see fellows die beside you, and listen to their prayers, and take their messages without getting outside yourself. Isn't it so?"

"Yes, it's so," Judith assured him. "But you'd better not talk."

"Oh, I must," said the Kennerly boy with that eagerness of apostleship that so many of the boys bring back from the front. "I fancy this spirit we've caught might have been lying here under the surface all the time. I don't know. I came from a different sort of country, from out in the West where the wheatfields lift to the sky the only spears we ever see. We never thought much of war, or causes, or sacrifice. We didn't need to. I fancy we were all fairly like that, drifting along, satisfied with the world as it was. But it's different now.

"There was a chap in the dugout with me," he continued, "who had it worked out this way. He believed that God had a purpose for all the suffering, the way our fathers had a purpose in all the punishments they used to give us. He'd been a professor, that chap, and he said that nothing in the physical world could be totally destroyed, and so he was sure that nothing in the spiritual world could be annihilated. It was all conserved to make immortality. He went under out there one day when he was telling us that.

I found in his pocket a clipping, a verse he used to say to us sometimes. I can say it off. Let's see, it goes this way."

From the mass of his bandages he began to quote in that high-strung voice that carried through the twilight of the tent a strange quality of other-worldliness:

"Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars! The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors."

""The Kingdom of God,'" Judith placed it for him.

"That's it!" he cried. "There was another line of it I remember,

"Oh, world unknowable, we know thee!""

"That's it," he insisted. "That's what the war's doing for the fellows like me. It's letting us know the unknowable world. It's opening the clay-shuttered doors. It's bringing to our ears the sound of wings that the writer chap who used to stand on London Bridge, thinking out the way of it all, heard when he wrote that stuff. That's the reason!"

He tried to rise on his cot, but Judith pressed him back firmly. "You mustn't talk," she bade him. She called to me across the darkening space. "Tell Doctor Thesiger I'm going to stay here until he comes to make this examination," she said.

The Kennerly boy's strange phrases rang in my ears as I went out. From the far horizon there came the booming of the big guns, resuming their relentless battering. Nearer, somewhere, an aeroplane buzzed like a huge, vindictive insect. Lights crossed and recrossed each other in long planes across the sky. The battle was raging once more.

I was standing at the door, looking off toward a low line of fire and thinking upon the musings of the Kennerly boy, when Ned Thesiger came through the dusk, holding in his hand the chief's letter to Judith. Before he entered the tent I told him Judith's question concerning the boy. "I'll have to look at him again," he said as he went in.

I had thought he would examine the boy before he gave the letter to Judith, and I

waited in the thought that he might need both Judith and myself; but he must have given her the chief's communication as soon as he went in, for it was only a moment before she came to the door with the open document in her hand. "What do you know about this, Rhoda?" she demanded, her voice curiously hard. I told her all the truth but my fundamental motive, the hope that Ned's act might one day break down the barrier between them. She listened rigidly, then turned to Ned, who had come to stand behind her.

"And you took it on yourselves to determine my life for me?" she said, her voice cutting the air like the swirl of a lash. "Because you would have wished to go away from here, you have thought it would be my wish. Well, I'll not take it!" She tore the letter across, flinging the pieces to the ground.

"You'll have to." The authority of the military surgeon sounded in Ned's voice. "The chief has not requested you to take a leave. He has ordered it."

"I'll go above his authority," Judith flung back at him. "I shall wire General Picquard to-night."

Over Ned Thesiger's face crept a softened look, but his voice still rang hard as he said curtly: "General Picquard died today at the front."

"Oh!" she cried in a grief that I knew was from no frustration of her wishes, but from a real sorrow at the passing of the fine old man she had known so well in days other than these. But she, too, set her shoulders in obstinate strength of will. "I shall not go from here," she repeated stubbornly. She faced Ned Thesiger with blazing eyes. "Why should you come back to hinder me in my course?" she threw challenge. "How dare you interfere in my life again? Haven't you done harm enough to me?"

"Not as much as I did myself," he said, wrenching out the words from that part of his consciousness that he had kept in the dark for the months he had worked beside the woman of his first love. "I have often thought that I served you well when you believed I had done you ill. You wouldn't have been happy with me, Judith. I would have been but a poor tool for your mastering brain. You would have given up for me the work that

has made you famous, the career that has brought you the success you always craved. And you would not have been happy. But I've owed you reparation, and I'm trying to make it. I'm only trying to save you for yourself. You're killing yourself here. I'm looking forward for you as you won't look. I'm looking to that time when the war is over when you may use your splendid experience, your quickened insight, your enlarged power, for your work. You'll be able to go back to it after this rest with the zest of genius. You owe it to yourself to consider that. And if you won't, it's my business to see that you must."

She looked him over quietly, consideringly, as if she were finding in him a new model; but there was a tension in her gaze that warned me even before she spoke. I was not prepared, however, for her query. "What are you going to do after this is over?" she asked him.

"I?" The question took him off guard. "Why, I'm going home," he said, "to put to use all that I've learned in this hell. I'm taking a leaf from your book of ambition, Judith. I'm going to be the most. famous surgeon in the States."

"Oh!" Her eyes widened. Then she laughed very quietly, but beneath the utter contempt of it I saw Ned Thesiger wince. "I might have known. What was it your father used to say, Rhoda, when we were children? 'You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.' Wasn't that it? Well, you can't. I might have known that fifteen years of material prosperity wouldn't change you, Ned, but I hoped, somehow, that it had. I tried to make myself believe that you had come here, as the rest of us came, to do what we could for the men who are doing bigger things than we can. I tried to believe that something in you, the thing I had once imagined was the real you, had come to life. But I was wrong. You've come here, come to this place of war and wounds and death, to this place where men are mounting their Jacob's ladders to eternity, to this place where God is showing the terror and the splendor of his face to mankind, and you dare to say that you seek not God's will nor man's comforting, but your own petty, miserable ends. No, I wouldn't have been

happy with you, although never until now have I believed it. Through all these years I have pictured you laboring in a noble profession while I was selfishly perfecting a skill that meant nothing to any one but myself. It was that thought which rushed me here when war came. That idea kept me for years from the bitterness that would have been mine had I believed you altogether unworthy of what I had once given you. Well, it's served its purpose, perhaps, since it brought me here. For now I've seen too much of sacrifice, too much of good, too much of martyrdom, to suffer from one little disillusion of my own. What does it matter about you and me? What do our sorrows, our hopes, count in the reckoning? The only thing in the world that endures is the thing that boy in there has found!" She turned her back upon us and crossed the floor of the tent in swinging strides that seemed to be taking her farther from us than the distance she traversed. Ned Thesiger switched on the electric light. Against it his face looked gray and old and his eyes miserable with the pain of a whipped dog that fails to understand the reason for its beating. Because I had known his limitations, his human failings, as Judith had never known them, I felt a sudden pang of pity for him. To the best of his power of vision he was sincere. If he failed to glimpse the heights on which she stalked, not his was the blame. In the way of men he had sinned and was sorry. In the way of angels Judith stood at the gate, holding aloft the flaming sword. Almost pathetically he drew himself up and went to his duty as if it were the one tangible post in a whirling world.

Above the quiet body of the Kennerly boy, unconscious now in the inevitable reaction from his tense visionings, Ned Thesiger and Judith looked at each other for an instant in which her scorn and his hurt leaped forth into clash. Then he bent over the boy, forgetting the man in the physician, I thought, as he worked. I brought the reflectors and the lights near. In the glare I saw the worry in his face deepen as Judith Garing stood motionless.

For moments he bent over the boy, probing, probing, scanning the gaping

wounds with narrowed eyes. He turned to me at last with the baffled look of a man who sees his road ahead of him but who cannot jump the horse of his will power over the fence that holds him from the running. He flung up his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"Has he no chance?" Judith asked, her eyes straight upon the man across the narrow cot. "One." "Well?" He shrugged.

"Why won't you take it?"

"I haven't the equipment; I gave Magnus all my disinfectants when he went out to-night."

"I have enough," she said, "to sterilize the instruments."

The

"It needs more than that. wound's rotten with infection. The man who operates will need a gallon of stuff to clean up if he doesn't want to run the chance of blood poisoning."

"Will it wait until they come back?" "No. It's to-night or never." Judith spoke to me. "Have you any disinfectant?"

"None. We've run low. There's been a delay somewhere on the line. They had to take all we had forward with them. They won't have enough at that."

"Why didn't you keep enough for this? Didn't you know you'd need it?" She knitted her brows over a problem her own questioning had raised. "Hadn't you examined him before? Didn't you realize how urgent this might be?"

"I had forgotten him," he said. "I was thinking of you."

She stared at him now without personal rancor or personal approbation, speculatively, as if her gaze might be a Roentgen ray into his soul. "And aren't you going to operate?" she asked.

"Do you know," he countered, "what this operation means?”

"Very well," she said. "I did a dozen of the sort myself after Mons."

"I don't mean that," he struck in impatiently. "It's not the actual incision I'm considering. That's simple enough. It's the afterclap. The man who cuts in there without bichloride enough to protect himself will sacrifice his hand, even if he saves his life!"

"And so," she said to herself rather than to either of us, "a common soldier dies that a famous surgeon may not be hampered." She stared down at the wisps of bright hair shining among the bandages on the Kennerly boy's head. "He's too young, too gay, to die," she said. "Bring me my kit, Rhoda, and what disinfectant we have. You will administer the anaesthetic."

"What are you going to do?" There was alarm in Ned Thesiger's cry.

"I am going," she said, "to give him his one chance."

"You can't!" he told her. "It's madness. Why, your hand! Your painting!" "What's that to a life? Or to my duty?"

He drew himself up at that. I had a fear that he would strike her down for that magnificent contempt of him that blazed from her dark eyes, and I drew nearer to them. But neither anger nor defiance, but a strange gleam of exultation shone in Ned Thesiger's eyes. He spoke no word as he faced Judith Garing triumphantly, but I seemed to see his flinging away of the mantle of selfishness that he had worn through the long years of his youth. Over the anger of Judith's face there crept the softer haze of interroga

tion. His only answer to it came in the radiance of his gaze upon her. The clayshuttered doors of his soul had swung open, their seal broken by the touch of Judith's hand. Across the years, across doubt, across pain, across fear, she spoke to him. "Oh, Ned, Ned!" she cried, “I knew, somehow, you'd do it for him!"

"I am not doing it for him, Judith," he said humbly. "I am doing it for you.'

"But-" She hesitated, her faith clouded for a moment in the thought that the motive nullified the glory of the of fering.

"Isn't it all the same in the end," he asked her, "if only we all do the best we can by the light of whatever candles we're given?"

"It must be," she said, her eyes luminous in the glory of her new-born justification of her old belief in him. Then, suddenly, she knelt down beside the Kennerly boy. I knew that she prayed, and I went away.

Afterward, as I stood above the boy from the front, administering the anæsthetic while Doctor Thesiger worked on his perilous task, I heard the thunder of the guns on the Somme, pouring out death upon a stricken world; but I heard, too, and nearer, a sound not of earththe drift of passing pinions.

OUNG Burnaby was late. He was always late. One associated him with lateness and certain eager, impossible excuses- he was always coming from somewhere to somewheres, and his "train was delayed," or his huge space-devouring motor "had broken down." You imagined him, enveloped in dust and dusk, his face disguised beyond human semblance, tearing up and down the highways of the world; or else in the corridor of a train, biting his nails with poorly concealed im

patience. As a matter of fact, when you saw him, he was beyond average correctly attired, and his manner was suppressed, as if to conceal the keenness that glowed behind his dark eyes and kept the color mounting and receding in his sunburnt cheeks. All of which, except the keenness, was a strange thing in a man who spent half his life shooting big game and exploring. But then, one imagined that Burnaby on the trail and Burnaby in a town were two entirely different persons. He liked his life with a thrust to it, and in a great city there are so many thrusts