He took up his bag and went out on the street, hailed the least vociferous of the taxi pirates and had himself driven to the Granada Hotel.  His brows were still knitting in abstracted thought when a bell-boy had transported the black bag and himself to a room on the sixth floor, received his gratuity and departed.  Thompson was high above the rumble of street cars, facing a thoroughfare given largely to motor traffic, with a window which overlooked the lower town and harbor, and the great hills across the Inlet looming duskily massive against the paler sky.

He stood by the window looking over roofs and traffic and the glow-worm light of shipping in the stream.  He could smell the sea, the brown kelp bared on rocky beaches by a falling tide.  And he fancied that even at that distance he could get a whiff of the fir and cedar that clothed the mountain flank.

“By God,” he whispered.  “It’s good to be back.”

He said it much as a man might breathe a prayer.  All this that he saw now had lingered in his memory, had risen up to confront him as something beautiful and desirable, many times when he never expected to see it again.  For it was not logical, he held, that he should survive where so many others had perished.  It was just a whimsey of Fate.  And he was duly and honestly grateful that it had been permitted him to outlive many gallant comrades in the perilous service of the air.

Three days and nights on a train close upon long months in hospital had left him very tired.  Rest both his body and uneasy nerves craved insistently.  Although it lacked some minutes of eight, he threw off his clothes and went to bed.

In the morning he rose refreshed, eager to be about, to look up men he knew, to talk of things beyond the scope of war.

But when he went out into Vancouver’s highways and met people, his uniform gave them a conversational cue.  And he found that here, six thousand miles from the guns, even less than among his fellows in the hangars behind the fighting line could he escape that topic.  He did not want to talk about fighting and killing.  He had lived those things and that was enough.  So he came back to the Granada and read the papers and had his lunch and decided to look up Tommy Ashe.

He had learned casually that morning that Tommy’s company had more than made good Tommy’s prophecy of swift work.  Tommy Ashe and Joe Hedley were rising young men.

“Oh, yes, they’ve got a mint,” a broker he knew said to Thompson, with an unconcealed note of envy.  “By gad, it’s a marvel how a pair of young cubs like that can start on a shoestring and make half a million apiece in two years.”

“How did they both manage to escape the draft?” Thompson asked.  “I’m sure Ashe is a Class A man.”

“Huh!” the broker snorted.  “Necessary government undertakings.  Necessary hell!  All they had to do with the shipbuilding was to bank their rake-off.  I tell you, Thompson, this country has supported the war in great style—­but there’s been a lot of raw stuff in places where you wouldn’t suspect it.  I’m not knocking, y’ understand.  This is no time to knock.  But when the war’s over, we’ve got to do some house-cleaning.”