Bessy sank back upon the lounge, clasping her hands, and her eyes appeared to darken, to turn purple with quickening thought and emotion.  Her exclamation brought the third girl of the party over to the lounge.  She was all eyes.  Her apathy had vanished.  She did not see the sulky young fellow who had followed her.

Lane could have laughed aloud.  He read the shallow souls of these older girls.  They could not help their instincts and he had learned that it was instinctive with women to become emotional over soldiers.  Bessy Bell was a child.  Hero-worship shone from her speaking eyes.  Whatever other young men might be to her, no one of them could compare with a soldier.

The situation had its pathos, its tragedy, and its gratification for Lane.  He saw clearly, and felt with the acuteness of a woman.  Helen had jilted him for such young men as these.  So in the feeling of the moment it cost him nothing to thrill and fascinate these girls with the story of how he had been shot through the leg.  It pleased him to see Helen’s green eyes dilate, to see Bessy Bell shudder.  Presently Lane turned to speak to the supercilious Swann.

“I didn’t have the luck to run across you in France!” he queried.

“No.  I didn’t go,” replied Swann.

“How was that?  Didn’t the draft get you?”

“Yes.  But my eyes were bad.  And my father needed me at the works.  We had a big army contract in steel.”

“Oh, I see,” returned Lane, with a subtle alteration of manner he could not, did not want to control.  But it was unmistakable in its detachment.  Next his gaze on Mackay did not require the accompaniment of a query.

“I was under weight.  They wouldn’t accept me,” he explained.

Bessy Bell looked at Mackay disdainfully.  “Why didn’t you drink a bucketful of water—­same as Billy Means did?  He got in.”

Helen laughed gayly.  “What!  Mac drink water?  He’d be ill....  Come, let’s dance.  Dick put on that new one.  Daren, you can watch us dance.”

Swann did as he was bidden, and as a loud, violent discordance blared out of the machine he threw away his cigarette, and turned to Helen.  She seemed to leap at him.  She had a pantherish grace.  Swann drew her closely to him, with his arm all the way round her, while her arm encircled his neck.  They began a fast swaying walk, in which Swann appeared to be forcing the girl over backwards.  They swayed, and turned, and glided; they made strange abrupt movements in accordance with the jerky tune; they halted at the end of a walk to make little steps forward and back; then they began to bounce and sway together in a motion that Lane instantly recognized as a toddle.  Lane remembered the one-step, the fox-trot and other new dances of an earlier day, when the craze for new dancing had become general, but this sort of gyration was vastly something else.  It disgusted Lane.  He felt the blood surge to his face.  He watched