“Indeed.  And why, Daren?”

“Because I’ll never be well again,” he replied sadly.

“Boy, don’t say that!” she appealed, with a hand going to his shoulder.

In the poignancy of the moment Lane lost his reserve and told her the truth of his condition, even going so far as to place her hand so she felt the great bayonet hole in his back.  Her silence then was more expressive than any speech.  She had the look of a woman in whom conscience was a reality.  And Lane divined that she felt she and her daughter, and all other women of this distraught land, owed him and his comrades a debt which could never be paid.  For once she expressed dignity and sweetness and genuine sorrow.

“You shock me, Daren.  But words are useless.  I hope and pray you’re wrong.  But right or wrong—­you’re a real American—­like our splendid forefathers.  Thank God that spirit still survives.  It is our only hope.”

Lane crossed to the window and looked out, slowly conscious of resurging self-control.  It was well that he had met Mrs. Wrapp first, for she gave him what he needed.  His bleeding vanity, his pride trampled in the dirt, his betrayed faith, his unquenchable spirit of hope for some far-future good—­these were not secrets he could hide from every one.

“Daren,” said Mrs. Wrapp, as he again turned to her, “if I were in my daughter’s place I’d beg you to take me back.  And if you would, I’d never leave your side for an hour until you were well or—­or gone....  But girls now are possessed of some infernal frenzy....  God only knows how far they go, but I’m one mother who is no fool.  I see little sign of real love in Helen or any of her friends....  And the men who lounge around after her!  Walk upstairs—­back to the end of the long hall—­open the door and go in.  You’ll find Helen and some of her associates.  You’ll find the men, young, sleek, soft, well-fed—­without any of the scars or ravages of war.  They didn’t go to war!...  They live for their bodies.  And I hate these slackers.  So does Helen’s father.  And for three years our house has been a rendezvous for them.  We’ve prospered, but that has been bitter fruit.”

Strong elemental passions Lane had seen and felt in people during the short twenty-four hours since his return home.  All of them had stung and astounded him, flung into his face the hard brutal facts of the materialism of the present.  Surely it was an abnormal condition.  And yet from the last quarter where he might have expected to find uplift, and the crystallizing of his attitude toward the world, and the sharpening of his intelligence—­from the hard, grim mother of the girl who had jilted him, these had come.  It was in keeping with all the other mystery.

“On second thought, I’ll go up with you,” continued Mrs. Wrapp, as he moved in the direction she had indicated.  “Come.”

The wide hall, the winding stairway with its soft carpet, the narrower hallway above—­these made a long journey for Lane.  But at the end, when Mrs. Wrapp stopped with hand on the farthest door, Lane felt knit like cold steel.