pictured notables, that he lost the thread of Mr. Martel's discourse until he heard him asking:

"What is the present? A clamor of the senses, a roar that deafens us to the music of life. I dwell in the past and in the future, Sergeant Graham—the dear reminiscent past and the glorious unborn future. And that reminds me that Cassius tells me that you are both about to receive your discharge from the army and are ready for the next great adventure. May I ask what yours is to be? A return, perhaps, to your native city?"

"My native city happens to be a river," said Quin. "I was born on a house-boat going up the Yangtse-Kiang."

"Indeed!" cried Mr. Martel with interest. "What a romantic beginning! And your family?"

"Haven't got any. You see, sir," said Quin, expanding under the flattering attention of his host, "my people were all missionaries. Most of them died off before I was fourteen, and I was shipped back to America to go to school. I didn't hold out very long, though. After two years in high school I ran away and joined the navy."

"And since then you have been a soldier of fortune, eh? No cares, no responsibilities. Free to roam the wide world in search of adventure."

Quin studied the end of his cigarette.

"That ain't so good as it sounds," he said. "Sometimes I think I'd amounted to more if I had somebody that belonged to me."

"Isn't it rather early in the season for a young man's fancy to be lightly turning——"

The quotation was lost upon Quin, but the twinkle in the speaker's expressive eye was not.

"I didn't mean that," he laughingly protested; "I mean a mother or a sister or somebody like that, who would be a kind of anchor. Take Cass, for instance; he's steady as a rock."

"Ah! Cassius! One in ten thousand. From the time he was twelve he has shared with me the financial burden. An artist, Sergeant Graham, must remain aloof from the market-place. Now that I have retired permanently from the stage in order to devote my time exclusively to writing, my only business engagement is a series of lectures at the university, where, as you know, I occupy the chair of Dramatic Literature."

The chair thus euphemistically referred to was scarcely more than a three-legged stool, which he occupied four mornings in the week, the rest of his time being spent at home in the arduous task of writing tragedies in blank verse.

"What I got to think about is a job," said Quin, much more interested in his own affairs than in those of his host.

"Commercial or professional?" inquired Mr. Martel.

"Oh, I can turn my hand to 'most anything," bragged Quin, blowing smoke-rings at the ceiling. "It's experience that counts, and, believe me, I've had a plenty."

"Experience plus education," added Mr. Martel; "we must not underestimate the advantages of education."

"That's where I'm short," admitted Quin. "My folks were all smart enough. Guess if they had lived I'd been put through college and all the rest of it. My grandfather was Dr. Ezra Quinby. Ever hear of him?"

Mr. Martel had to acknowledge that he had not.

"Guess he is better known in China than in America," said Quin. "He died before I was born."

"And you have no people in America?"

"No people anywhere," said Quin cheerfully; "but I got a lot of friends scattered around over the world, and a bull-dog and a couple of cats up at a lumber-camp near Portland."

"Cassius tells me that you are thinking of returning to Maine."

Quin ran his fingers through his hair and laughed. "That was yesterday," he said. "To-day you couldn't get me out of Kentucky with a machine-gun!"

Claude Martel rose and laid an affectionate hand on his shoulder. "Then, my boy, we claim you as our own. Cassius' home is your home, his family your family, his——"

The address of welcome was cut short by Cass's arrival with an armful of wood which he deposited on the hearth, and a moment later the girls, followed by Edwin, came trooping in from the kitchen.

"Let's make a circle round the fire and sing the old year out," suggested Rose gaily. "Myrna, get the banjo and the guitar. Shall I play on the piano, Papa Claude, or will you?"

Mr. Martel, expressing the noble sentiment that age should always be an accompaniment to youth, took his place at the piano and, with a pose worthy of Rubinstein, struck a few preliminary chords, while the group about the fire noisily settled itself for the evening.

"You can put your head against my knees, if you like," Rose said to Quin, who was sprawling on the floor at her feet. "There, is that comfy?"

"I'll say it's all right!" said Quin with heartfelt satisfaction.

There was something free and easy and gipsy-like about the evening, a sort of fireside picnic that brought June dreams in January. As the hours wore on, the singing, which had been noisy and rollicking, gradually mellowed into sentiment, a sentiment that found vent in dreamy eyes and long-drawn-out choruses, with a languorous over-accentuation of the sentimental passages. One by one, the singers fell under the spell of the music and the firelight. Cass and Fan Loomis sat shoulder to shoulder on the broken-springed couch and gazed with blissful oblivion into the red embers on the hearth. Rose, whose voice led all the rest, surreptitiously wiped her eyes when no one was looking; Edwin and Myrna, solemnly plucking their banjo and guitar, were lost in moods of dormant emotion; while Papa Claude at the piano let his dim eyes range the pictured walls, while his memory traveled back through the years on many a secret tryst of its own.

But it was the lank Sergeant with the big feet, and the hair that stood up where it shouldn't, who dared to dream the most preposterous dream of them all. For, as he sang there in the firelight, a little god was busy lighting the tapers in the most sacred shrines of his being, until he felt like a cathedral at high mass with all the chimes going.

How many times he had sung it in France!—jolting along muddy, endless roads, heartsick, homesick.

What had "you" meant to him then? A girl—a pretty girl, of course; but any girl. And now?

Ah, now he knew what he had been going toward, not only on those terrible roads in France, but all through the years of his life. An exquisite, imperious little officer's girl with divinely compassionate eyes, who wasn't ashamed to dance with a private, and who had let him hold her hand at parting while she said in accents an angel might have envied, "Good-by, Soldier Boy."

Quin sighed profoundly and slipped his arm under his head, and at the same moment the owner of the knee upon which he was leaning also heaved a sigh and shifted her position, and somehow in the adjustment two lonely hands came in contact and evidently decided that, after all, substitutes were some comfort.

It was not until all the whistles in town had announced the birth of the New Year that the party broke up, and it was not until then that Quin realized that he was very tired, and that his pulse was behaving in a way that was, alas, all too familiar.

CHAPTER 3

Friday after New Year's found Sergeant Graham again flat on his back at the Base Hospital, facing sentence of three additional weeks in bed. In vain had he risked a reprimand by hotly protesting the point with the Captain; in vain had he declared to the nurse that he would rather live on his feet than die on his back. Judgment was passed, and he lay with