As if impelled by a dark and sinister force, he slowly leaned down to pull his bag from under the bed.  He opened it, and drew out his Colt’s automatic gun.  Though the June day was warm this big worn metal weapon had a cold touch.  He did not feel that he wanted to handle it, but he did.  It seemed heavy, a thing of subtle, latent energy, with singular fascination for him.  It brought up a dark flowing tide of memory.  Lane shut his eyes, and saw the tide flow by with its conflict and horror.  The feel of his gun, and the recall of what it had meant to him in terrible hours, drove away a wavering of will, and a still voice that tried to pierce his consciousness.  It fixed his sinister intention.  He threw the gun on the bed, and rising began to pace the floor.

“If I told what I saw—­no jury on earth would convict me,” he soliloquized.  “But I’ll kill him—­and keep my mouth shut.”

Plan after plan he had pondered in mind—­and talked over with Blair—­something to thwart Richard Swann—­to give Margaret the chance for happiness and love her heart craved—­to put out of Lorna’s way the evil influence that had threatened her.  Now the solution came to him.  Sooner or later he would catch Swann with his sister in an automobile, or at the club rooms, or at some other questionable place.  He knew Lorna was meeting Swann.  He had tried to find them, all to no avail.  What he might have done heretofore was no longer significant; he knew what he meant to do now.

But all at once Lane was confronted with remembrance of another thing he had resolved upon—­equally as strong as his determination to save Lorna—­and it was his intention to persuade Mel Iden to marry him.

He loved his sister, but not as he loved Mel Iden.  Whatever had happened to Lorna or might happen, she would be equal to it.  She had the boldness, the cool, calculating selfishness of the general run of modern girls.  Her reactions were vastly different front Mel Iden’s.  Lane had lost hope of saving Lorna’s soul.  He meant only to remove a baneful power from her path, so that she might lean to the boy who wanted to marry her.  When in his sinister intent he divined the passionate hate of the soldier for the slacker he refused to listen to his conscience.  The way out in Lorna’s case he had discovered.  But what relation had this new factor of his dilemma to Mel Iden?  He could never marry her after he had killed Swann.

Lane went to bed, and when he rested his spent body, he pondered over every phase of the case.  Reason and intelligence had their say.  He knew he had become morbid, sick, rancorous, base, obsessed with this iniquity and his passion to stamp on it, as if it were a venomous serpent.  He would have liked to do some magnificent and awful deed, that would show this little, narrow, sordid world at home the truth, and burn forever on their memories the spirit of a soldier.  He had made a sacrifice that few understood.  He had no reward except a consciousness that grew more luminous and glorious in its lonely light as time went on.  He had endured the uttermost agonies of hell, a thousand times worse than death, and he had come home with love, with his faith still true.  To what had he returned?