The Hidden Places

hadow his body cast on the wall in the pale glow of a single droplight. He was seeing everything and seeing nothin

terror had folded itself ab

great deal which his perception was too acute to misunderstand. He had struggled desperately against the unescapabl

ith a start, like a man withdrawing his mind from wandering in far places. He sat down before the dressing-table and forced himself to

Hollister, in the flush of manhood, with a body whose symmetry and vigor other men had envied, a mind that functioned alertly, a spirit as nearly indomitable as the spirit of man may be, was lik

ng hours of tortured flesh, bodily pain that racked him until he had wished for death as a welcome relief. Bu

e had to face, a life that held nothing but frustration and denial of all that was necessary to him, which was making him suffer as acutely as he had ever suffered in the field, under the knives of callous surgeons, in the sham

as based upon undeniable reality. He was no more captain of his soul than any man born of woman has ever been when he descends into the dark places. But he knew that he must shake off that feeling, or go mad, or kill himself. One of the

e because instinct was stronger than reason, stronger than any of the appalling facts he encountered and knew he must go on encountering. He had to live, with a past that was no

untenance. To have people always shrink from him. To be denied companionship, friendship, love, to know that so many thin

ing on him for weeks. To-night the full realization of what it meant engulfed him with terror. That was all. He did not cry

w the stirring panorama of his existence for the past four years. There was nothing that did not fill him with infinite regret-and there was nothing which by any conceivable effort he could have changed. He could not have es

he clinging pressure of her arms, her cry that she would be so lonely. He saw himself in billets, poring over her letters. He saw himself swinging up the line with his company, crawling back with shattered ranks a

ear up under it. He saw his second Channel crossing with a flesh wound in his thigh, when there seemed to his hyper-sensitive mind a faint perfunctoriness in her greeting. It was on this leave that h

hat letter in which she told him with child-like directness that he had grown dim and distant and that she loved another man. She was sure he would not care

a shredded smear when he felt it with groping fingers. He remembered that he lay there wondering, becaus

e chaos of demobilization to get in touch with his regiment, to establish his identity, to find his wife. He was officially dead. He had been so reported, so accepted eighteen months earlier.

deserted, disfigured, a bit of war's wreckage. He did not particularly consider himse

ll warm human impulses flowed so strongly, to be penniless, to have all the dependable fou

all the strange shifts he would be put to, the humiliations he would suffer, the crushing weight of hopelessness which gathered upon him by the time he arrived on the Pacific Coast, where he had

ere, upon the evening of the third day in Vancouver, a blind and indescribable fear seized upon him, a sickening conviction that although living, he was dead,-dead in so far as the common, casual intimacies of daily intercourse with his fellows went

surge of vast stores of energy. His brain functioned with a bright, bitter clearness. He could feel,-ah, that was the hell of it. That quivering response to the subtle nuances of thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essen

him the wild impulse to rus

am as able to love and hate as you. Was all your talk about honorable scars just prattle to mislead the

ring from shell shock. A frock-coated committee would gravely recommend him

omething rose chokingly in his throat. Into his eyes a slow, scalding w