“You were always a good boy, Daren, to me and Lorna,” murmured Mrs. Lane, almost in tears.  “It’s cheered me to get you home, yet....  Oh, if you were well and strong!”

“Never mind, mother.  I’ll get better,” he replied, rising to take up his bag.  “I guess now I’d better go to bed.  I’m just about all in....  Wonder how Blair and Red are.”

His mother followed him up the narrow stairway, talking, trying to pretend she did not see his dragging steps, his clutch on the banisters.

“Your room’s just as you left it,” she said, opening the door.  Then on the threshold she kissed him.  “My son, I thank God you have come home alive.  You give me hope in—­in spite of all....  If you need me, call.  Good night.”

Lane was alone in the little room that had lived in waking and dreaming thought.  Except to appear strangely smaller, it had not changed.  His bed and desk—­the old bureau—­the few pictures—­the bookcase he had built himself—­these were identical with images in his memory.

A sweet and wonderful emotion of peace pervaded his soul—­fulfilment at last of the soldier’s endless longing for home, bed, quiet, rest.

“If I have to die—­I can do it now without hate of all around me,” he whispered, in the passion of his spirit.

But as he sat upon his bed, trying with shaking and clumsy hands to undress himself, that exalted mood flashed by.  Some of the dearest memories of his life were associated with this little room.  Here he had dreamed; here he had read and studied; here he had fought out some of the poignant battles of youth.  So much of life seemed behind him.  At last he got undressed, and extinguishing the light, he crawled into bed.

The darkness was welcome, and the quiet was exquisitely soothing.  He lay there, staring into the blackness, feeling his body sink slowly as if weighted.  How cool and soft the touch of sheets!  Then, the river of throbbing fire that was his blood, seemed to move again.  And the dull ache, deep in the bones, possessed his nerves.  In his breast there began a vibrating, as if thousands of tiny bubbles were being pricked to bursting in his lungs.  And the itch to cough came back to his throat.  And all his flesh seemed in contention with a slowly ebbing force.  Sleep might come perhaps after pain had lulled.  His heart beat unsteadily and weakly, sometimes with a strange little flutter.  How many weary interminable hours had he endured!  But to-night he was too far spent, too far gone for long wakefulness.  He drifted away and sank as if into black oblivion where there sounded the dreadful roll of drums, and images moved under gray clouds, and men were running like phantoms.  He awoke from nightmares, wet with cold sweat, and lay staring again at the blackness, once more alive to recurrent pain.  Pain that was an old, old story, yet ever acute and insistent and merciless.

The night wore on, hour by hour.  The courthouse clock rang out one single deep mellow clang.  One o’clock!  Lane thrilled to the sound.  It brought back the school days, the vacation days, the Indian summer days when the hills were golden and the purple haze hung over the land—­the days that were to be no more for Daren Lane.