CHAPTER I

What subtle strange message had come to her out of the West?  Carley Burch laid the letter in her lap and gazed dreamily through the window.

It was a day typical of early April in New York, rather cold and gray, with steely sunlight.  Spring breathed in the air, but the women passing along Fifty-seventh Street wore furs and wraps.  She heard the distant clatter of an L train and then the hum of a motor car.  A hurdy-gurdy jarred into the interval of quiet.

“Glenn has been gone over a year,” she mused, “three months over a year—­ and of all his strange letters this seems the strangest yet.”

She lived again, for the thousandth time, the last moments she had spent with him.  It had been on New-Year’s Eve, 1918.  They had called upon friends who were staying at the McAlpin, in a suite on the twenty-first floor overlooking Broadway.  And when the last quarter hour of that eventful and tragic year began slowly to pass with the low swell of whistles and bells, Carley’s friends had discreetly left her alone with her lover, at the open window, to watch and hear the old year out, the new year in.  Glenn Kilbourne had returned from France early that fall, shell-shocked and gassed, and otherwise incapacitated for service in the army—­a wreck of his former sterling self and in many unaccountable ways a stranger to her.  Cold, silent, haunted by something, he had made her miserable with his aloofness.  But as the bells began to ring out the year that had been his ruin Glenn had drawn her close, tenderly, passionately, and yet strangely, too.

“Carley, look and listen!” he had whispered.

Under them stretched the great long white flare of Broadway, with its snow-covered length glittering under a myriad of electric lights.  Sixth Avenue swerved away to the right, a less brilliant lane of blanched snow.  The L trains crept along like huge fire-eyed serpents.  The hum of the ceaseless moving line of motor cars drifted upward faintly, almost drowned in the rising clamor of the street.  Broadway’s gay and thoughtless crowds surged to and fro, from that height merely a thick stream of black figures, like contending columns of ants on the march.  And everywhere the monstrous electric signs flared up vivid in white and red and green; and dimmed and paled, only to flash up again.

Ring out the Old!  Ring in the New!  Carley had poignantly felt the sadness of the one, the promise of the other.  As one by one the siren factory whistles opened up with deep, hoarse bellow, the clamor of the street and the ringing of the bells were lost in a volume of continuous sound that swelled on high into a magnificent roar.  It was the voice of a city—­of a nation.  It was the voice of a people crying out the strife and the agony of the year—­pealing forth a prayer for the future.

Glenn had put his lips to her ear:  “It’s like the voice in my soul!” Never would she forget the shock of that.  And how she had stood spellbound, enveloped in the mighty volume of sound no longer discordant, but full of great, pregnant melody, until the white ball burst upon the tower of the Times Building, showing the bright figures 1919.