miles of red tape.  He was dead—­killed in action.  It would never occur to the British War Office to seek publicity for the fact that he was not dead.  There was no machinery for that purpose.  Even if there were such machinery, there was no one to pull the levers.  Nothing was ever set in motion in the War Office without pulling a diversity of levers.  So much for that.  Hollister, recalling his experience in London, smiled sardonically at thought of the British War Office voluntarily troubling itself about dead men who came to life.  The War Office would not know him.  The War Office did not know men.  It only knew identification numbers, regiments, ranks, things properly documented, officially assigned.  It was disdainful of any casual inquiry; it would shunt such from official to official, from department to department, until the inquirer was worn out, his patience, his fund of postage and his time alike exhausted.

No, the British War Office would neither know nor care nor tell.

Surely the slate was sponged clean.  Should he condemn himself and Doris Cleveland to heartache and loneliness because of a technicality?  To Hollister it seemed no more than that.  Myra had married again.  Would she—­reckoning the chance that she learned he was alive—­rise up to denounce him?  Hardly.  His own people?  They were few and far away.  His friends?  The war had ripped everything loose, broken the old combinations, scattered the groups.  There was, for Hollister, nothing left of the old days.  And he himself was dead,—­officially dead.

After all, it narrowed to himself and Doris Cleveland and an ethical question.

He did not shut his eyes to the fact that for him this marriage would be bigamy; that their children would be illegitimate in the eyes of the law if legal scrutiny ever laid bare their father’s history; nor that by all the accepted dictums of current morality he would be leading an innocent woman into sin.  But current morality had ceased to have its old significance for Hollister.  He had seen too much of it vaporized so readily in the furnace of the war.  Convention had lost any power to dismay him.  His world had used him in its hour of need, had flung him into the Pit, and when he crawled out maimed, discouraged, stripped of everything that had made life precious, this world of his fellows shunned him because of what he had suffered in their behalf.  So he held himself under no obligation to be guided by their moral dictums.  He was critical of accepted standards because he had observed that an act might be within the law and still outrage humanity; it might be legally sanctioned and socially approved and spread intolerable misery in its wake.  Contrariwise, he could conceive a thing beyond the law being meritorious in itself.  With the Persian tent-maker, Hollister had begun to see that “A hair, perhaps, divides the false and true.”