but the plain cold fact of perversion of human nature!  Daren Lane is so far above your comprehension that it seems useless to defend him.  I have never done it before.  He would not thank me.  But this once I will speak....  In our group of service men—­so few of whom came home—­he was a hero.  We all loved him.  And for soldiers at war that tribute is the greatest.  If there was a dirty job to be done, Daren Lane volunteered for it.  If there was a comrade to be helped, Daren Lane was the first to see it.  He never thought of himself.  The dregs of war did not engulf him as they did so many of us.  He was true to his ideal.  He would have been advanced for honors many a time but for the enmity of our captain.  He won the Croix de Guerre by as splendid a feat as I saw during the war....  Thank God, we had some officers who treated us like men—­who were men themselves.  But for the majority we common soldiers were merely beasts of burden, dogs to drive.  This captain of whom I speak was a padded shape—­shirker from the front line—­a parader of his uniform before women.  And he is that to-day—­a chaser of women—­girls—­girls of fifteen....  Yet he has the adulation of Middleville while Daren Lane is an outcast....  My God, is there no justice?  At home here Daren Lane has not done one thing that was not right.  Some of the gossip about him is as false as hell.  He has tried to do noble things.  If he married Mel Iden, as you say, it was in some exalted mood to help her, or to give his name to her poor little nameless boy.”

Blair paused a moment in a deliberate speech that toward the end had grown breathless.  The faces before him seemed swaying in a mist.

“As for myself,” he continued in passionate hurry, “I did not lose my leg!...  I sacrificed it.  I gave my career, my youth, my health, my body—­and I will soon have given my life—­for my country and my people.  I was proud to do it.  Never for a moment have I regretted it....  What I lost—­Ah! what I lost was respect for”—­Blair choked—­“for the institution that had deluded me.  What I lost was not my leg but my faith in God, in my country, in the gratitude of men left at home, in the honor of women.”

Friday, the tenth of January, dawned cold, dark, dreary, and all day a dull clouded sky promised rain or snow.  From a bride’s point of view it was not a propitious day for a wedding.  A half hour before five o’clock a stream of carriages began to flow toward St. Marks and promptly at five the door of the church shut upon a large and fashionable assembly.

The swelling music of the wedding march pealed out.  The bridal party filed into the church.  The organ peals hushed.  The resonant voice of a minister, with sing-song solemnity, began the marriage service.

Margaret Maynard knew she stood there in the flesh, yet the shimmering white satin, the flowing veil, covered some one who was a stranger to her.