Helen fell on the couch, and burying her face in the pillows she began to sob.  Lane looked down at her, at her glistening auburn hair, and slender, white, ringed hand clutching the cushions, at her lissom shaking form, at the shapely legs in the rolled-down silk stockings—­and he felt a melancholy happiness in the proof that he had reached her shallow heart, and in the fact that this was the moment of loss.

“Good-bye—­Helen,” he said.

“Daren—­don’t—­go,” she begged.

But he had to go, for other reasons beside the one that this was the end of all intimate relation between him and Helen.  He had overtaxed his strength, and the burning pang in his breast was one he must heed.  On the hall stairway a dizzy spell came over him.  He held on to the banister until the weakness passed.  Fortunately there was no one to observe him.  Somehow the sumptuous spacious hall seemed drearily empty.  Was this a home for that twenty-year-old girl upstairs?  Lane opened the door and went out.  He was relieved to find the taxi waiting.  To the driver he gave the address of his home and said:  “Go slow and don’t give me a jar!”

But Lane reached home, and got into the house, where he sat at the table with his mother and Lorna, making a pretense of eating, and went upstairs and into his bed without any recurrence of the symptoms that had alarmed him.  In the darkness of his room he gradually relaxed to rest.  And rest was the only medicine for him.  It had put off hour by hour and day by day the inevitable.

“If it comes—­all right—­I’m ready,” he whispered to himself.  “But in spite of all I’ve been through—­and have come home to—­I don’t want to die.”

There was no use in trying to sleep.  But in this hour he did not want oblivion.  He wanted endless time to think.  And slowly, with infinite care and infallible memory, he went over every detail of what he had seen and heard since his arrival home.  In the headlong stream of consciousness of the past hours he met with circumstances that he lingered over, and tried to understand, to no avail.  Yet when all lay clearly before his mental gaze he felt a sad and tremendous fascination in the spectacle.

For many weeks he had lived on the fancy of getting home, of being honored and loved, of being given some little meed of praise and gratitude in the short while he had to live.  Alas! this fancy had been a dream of his egotism.  His old world was gone.  There was nothing left.  The day of the soldier had passed—­until some future need of him stirred the emotions of a selfish people.  This new world moved on unmindful, through its travail and incalculable change, to unknown ends.  He, Daren Lane, had been left alone on the vast and naked shores of Lethe.