After a time he shook off the first paralyzing grip of this unnameable terror which had seized him with clammy hands, fought it down by sheer resolution.  He was able to lie staring into the dusky spaces of his room and review the stirring panorama of his existence for the past four years.  There was nothing that did not fill him with infinite regret—­and there was nothing which by any conceivable effort he could have changed.  He could not have escaped one of those calamities which had befallen him.  He could not have left undone a single act that he had performed.  There was an inexorable continuity in it all.  There had been a great game.  He had been one of the pawns.

Hollister shut his eyes.  Immediately, like motion pictures projected upon a screen, his mind began to project visions.  He saw himself kissing his wife good-by.  He saw the tears shining in her eyes.  He felt again the clinging pressure of her arms, her cry that she would be so lonely.  He saw himself in billets, poring over her letters.  He saw himself swinging up the line with his company, crawling back with shattered ranks after a hammering, repeating this over and over again till it seemed like a nightmare in which all existence was comprised in blood and wounds and death and sorrow, enacted at stated intervals to the rumble of guns.

He saw himself on his first leave in London, when he found that Myra was growing less restive under his absence, when he felt proud to think that she was learning the lesson of sacrifice and how to bear up under it.  He saw his second Channel crossing with a flesh wound in his thigh, when there seemed to his hyper-sensitive mind a faint perfunctoriness in her greeting.  It was on this leave that he first realized how the grim business he was engaged upon was somehow rearing an impalpable wall between himself and this woman whom he still loved with a lover’s passion after four years of marriage.

And he could see, in this mental cinema, whole searing sentences of the letter he received from her just before a big push on the Somme in the fall of ’17—­that letter in which she told him with child-like directness that he had grown dim and distant and that she loved another man.  She was sure he would not care greatly.  She was sorry if he did.  But she could not help it.  She had been so lonely.  People were bound to change.  It couldn’t be helped.  She was sorry—­but—­

And Hollister saw himself later lying just outside the lip of a shell-crater, blind, helpless, his face a shredded smear when he felt it with groping fingers.  He remembered that he lay there wondering, because of the darkness and the strange silence and the pain, if he were dead and burning in hell for his sins.

After that there were visions of himself in a German hospital, in a prison camp, and at last the armistice, and the Channel crossing once more.  He was dead, they told him, when he tried in the chaos of demobilization to get in touch with his regiment, to establish his identity, to find his wife.  He was officially dead.  He had been so reported, so accepted eighteen months earlier.  His wife had married again.  She and her husband had vanished from England.  And with his wife had vanished his assets, his estate, by virtue of a pre-war arrangement which he had never revoked.