"Why did you come? To blow us up again? Lose your nerve?"

"Yes, I lost it to-night--and something more."

"Blair, you shouldn't have left one of your legs in France," she said,
turning to Blair. She had always hated Blair, a fact omnipresent now
in her green eyes.

Blair had left courtesy and endurance in France, as was evinced by the
way he bent closer to Helen, to speak low, with terrible passion.

"If I had it to do over again--I'd see _you_ and _your_ kind--your
dirt-cheap crowd of painted hussies where you belong--in the clutch of
the Huns!"




CHAPTER IX


Miss Amanda Hill, teacher in the Middleville High School, sat wearily
at her desk. She was tired, as tired as she had ever been on any day
of the fifteen long years in which she had wrestled with the problems
of school life. Her hair was iron gray and she bent a worn, sad,
severe face over a mass of notes before her.

At that moment she was laboring under a perplexing question that was
not by any means a new one. Only this time it had presented itself in