And men were—­hard.  He had been hard, perhaps, in the things he had said in his letter.  Her words rang in his ears.  “I had a queer feeling at first that you were very far away, and that I could not reach you.”  And she had said that, when his soul ached to have her near.

Yet he had tried to do the best that he could for Becky.  He had felt that she must not be bound by a tie that was no longer needed to protect her from Dalton.  She was safe at ’Sconset, with the Admiral and her new friends the Copes.  He envied them their hours with her.  He was desperately lonely, with a loneliness which had no hope.

He worked intensively.  The boarders had gone from King’s Crest, and he and the Major had moved into the big house.  Randy spent a good deal of time in the Judge’s library at Huntersfield.  He and Truxton had great plans for their future.  They read law, sold cars, and talked of their partnership.  The firm was to be “Bannister, Paine and Beaufort”; it was to have brains, conscience, and business acumen.

“In the order named,” Truxton told the Major.  “The Judge has brains, Randy has a conscience.  There’s nothing left for me but to put pep into the business end of it.”

Randy worked, too, on his little story.  He did not know in the least what he was going to do with it, but it was an outlet for the questions which he kept asking himself.  The war was over and the men who had fought had ceased to be important.  He and the Major and Truxton talked a great deal about it.  The Major took the high stand of each man’s satisfaction in the thing he had done.  Truxton was light-heartedly indifferent.  He had his Mary, and his future was before him.  But Randy argued that the world ought not to forget.  “It was a rather wonderful thing for America.  I want her to keep on being wonderful.”

The Major in his heart knew that the boy was right.  America must keep on being wonderful.  Her young men must go high-hearted to the tasks of peace.  It was the high-heartedness of people which had won the war.  It would be the high-heartedness of men and women which would bring sanity and serenity to a troubled world.

“The difficulty lies in the fact that we are always trying to make laws to right the world, when what we need is to form individual ideals.  The boy who says in his heart, ‘I want to be like Lincoln,’ and who stands in front of a statue of Lincoln, and learns from that rugged countenance the lesson of simple courage and honesty, has a better chance of a future than the boy who is told, ’There is evil in the world, and the law punishes those who transgress.’  Half of our Bolsheviks would be tamed if they had the knowledge and love of some simple hero in their hearts, and felt that there was a chance for them to be heroic.  The war gave them a chance.  We have now to show them that there is beauty and heroism in orderly living——­”

He was talking to Madge.  She was still with the Flippins.  The injury to her foot had been more serious than it had seemed.  She might have gone with Oscar and Flora when they left Hamilton Hill.  But she preferred to stay.  Flora was to go to a hospital; Madge would not be needed.