mean that you are--_straight_!"

She did not answer--only now she turned her face toward him and lifted
up her head.

And for a long minute Madison gazed into the tear-splashed eyes, deep,
brave in chastened wistfulness, gazed--and like a man stunned walked
from the room, the cottage, and out across the lawn.




--XX--

TO THE VICTOR ARE THE SPOILS


Many were still about the lawn as he left the cottage--they were all
about him, those sick, half frantic creatures--and still they made
noises; still some of them cried and sobbed; still in their waning
paroxysms they moved hither and thither. They appealed to some numbed,
dormant sense in Madison, in a subconscious way, as things to be
avoided. And so, almost mechanically, he took the little path that,
striking off at right angles to the wagon track where it joined the
Patriarch's lawn, came out again upon the main road at the further end
of the village.

And, as he walked, like tidal waves on-rushing, emotions, utterly at
variance one with another, hurled themselves upon him, and he was swept
from his mental balance, tossed here and there, rolled gasping,