"If there is a row I sha'n't go," he said. "I'd worry about the kids an' you so I'd forget to shoot and get court-martialed." "You never forget anything, Ben." "No," Eben said; "I don't." Presently, because he would not dishonor her with a lie, he said:

"And it's worse than ever right now, my not forgetting. It's that that 's making me so miserable. I can't help it, Ria." "He 's in this new thing," said Marie, "the armored motor battalion. Sid Waters told me."

How splendid he must look in khaki! Eben thought. Then all his imagination glittered to a scene of dusty cactus and the smile fixed on approaching death, the fair body.

"O Ben," cried his wife, "I should n't have told you!"

THAT night the newsboys had a fresh surprising bellow from the wire, and the next day a man in Washington called on the militia of the several States to protect the border.

"By gosh!" said Arthur, "do you see me sweating under a cactus-tree? Let's go to a revue to-night."

Eben assented. His girl model was sniffling for a brother in the Sixty-ninth, and Marie's eyes were gleaming at his face. He was in hell, sending out hourly for the extras that might tell him what regiments were under arms; and in the rainy glare of Broadway he saw Judson through their taxicab window, glorious in his khaki service cap on the guard of an open car splashed with uniforms. And he sat until dawn, his arms gripped under his knees, glaring at the dark.

"I can't work," he told Marie. "Have 'em tell the models to go to blazes."

The streets showed spurts of mustard cloth while he tramped, and he met men he knew, savagely irritated, uplifted, awkward in stiff belts. In his imagination he heard the trailed notes of the dead march; the volley of a burial squad came back from the shadow of Fort Leavenworth.

Eben Harland, killed in action." jerked before him on the rainfalls.

It

"He's nearly mad," said Marie to her brother later.

"So am I," Arthur said, his eyes scarred under with black. "If Jud goes and gets killed he 'll never- You never saw them together. Don't say a word."

"Is he ordered?"

"Can't say. How can a man go on loving a fool that won't. even come to his wedding? The-"

"He does. Let it go," said Marie, sternly.

THE next noon Eben woke with a lucid mind and a perfect resolve. He belonged to Marie, to his sons, not to Judson, who had cast him away for a word or so, for a dollar's worth of green striped silk. It seemed quite clear. He must go on loving Judson, bear unconquered to the verge of being that high and holy warmth, guard it, cherish it, and protect it. He bathed in icy water and sat down at his desk.

"Dear Jud," he wrote, "I am sending this to your office as I can't find you in the telephone-book. Since this order to the militia was published I have been in a horrible state of mind. Come and see me before you go if you can bring yourself to it. I have never stopped thinking of you as my best and dearest friend, and nothing has altered my feeling for you. If you hate me so much that you cannot do this, I-"

A cloud passed over his brain, the pen broke in his fingers.

"O Lord!" he said, "he might n't even read it." He wrote: "I will put up with it the best I can, but I think more of you than of any one else in the world. Ben."

He addressed the envelop carefully, and put a special-delivery stamp upon it. His brain had become confused once more, and in cure of this he walked into the nursery before luncheon. Young Juddy was playing with a large red elephant, the twins were engrossed in their noontime orangejuice, and the Yankee nurse told Eben she thought it was real dreadful about this

tellier stated, steering the red elephant among the table covers.

"Yes, but why?" Juddy persisted, without interest.

Eben bent his lips on the soft head. "Because he's the finest man alive," he said softly. "Will you excuse me, sir? I'd forgotten to 'phone some one."

He descended into Park Avenue and turned down the wide, rain-pooled street. It was quite empty; only shuttered windows looked upon his going. The June sun had burned through the oily clouds of the morning and lit the drenched' flag of the armory tower. Even so far off he could see a mustard uniform on the steps before the arched grill, and the wet granite beckoned him. People strolled or scurried from the pausing trolleys. No one passed Eben as he walked, cursing himself, down the pleasant, wealthy street, and he reasoned that New York, the world, would be like this vacancy with Jud gone from it, a stolid desolation, a sunny tomb.

going into a hotel near, artillery clothes, big, strapping fellow. I thought it was Ben for a minute; dead image of him. That was why I asked you if he was here when I came in."

"That must have been Judson," said Eben, spilling gin on the Portuguese embroidery.

"Oh, yes, your brother. Well, you must be pretty worried," said Mr. Letellier, heartily.

"My name 's Judson," said Judson, reverting to his father's knee. "Why 'm I named Judson?"

"For your uncle, of course," Mr. Le

He came to the last block of the east side,

which ends at the armory corner in a lawn, iron fenced, with almost rural shrubs and a faded Tudor house, inept residue of some less urban day. Eben kept his eyes on the armory tower, stupidly archaic, crushing the vista of further commerce, and brushed his hand on the pickets of the iron fence. A man in uniform cut obliquely from the subway stairs and came toward him. The color brought his gaze down, and he saw Judson, his artillery cap a little pushed from his brow, the trim coat lining his unchanged splendor,

brilliant player, but so reliable that coaches and trainers spoke of him as a possible future captain, and two fraternities waited on his choice with smiles more than inviting.

"What 's Jud's address at Princeton?" Arthur asked when the great gala was near. "I'm going to have lunch here in these rooms the day of the game."

"Huh? Oh, just Princeton 'll get him." "It might n't. I've sent letters there before."

Eben took his eyes off the sketch he was filling in and looked at Arthur wearily.

"I might as well tell you the truth, Let. I don't know his address. We've not spoken or met in over a year-a year and two months. He does n't care about me any more.'

He glanced around their red burlap sitting-room and went on charcoaling the paper, shuddering before the advent of questions.

"I ought to have known," said Arthur. "All right, Ben; I won't say anything."

After this, and while Eben lay in the infirmary with the broken shoulder he got during the last second of play, Arthur gave him a new and far-seeing kindness that compensated a little for many things. The Letelliers had been driven to moving East. They now owned a house at Mamaroneck, and Eben spent Christmas there. He met a girl who had encountered Judson at Pasadena the previous summer as a friend of one Alan Kay. Eben resigned her to Arthur for the rest of his dance, and haunted Marie Letellier's wake for the remainder of the party. She was a gentle, timid girl a month younger than himself, and Eben grew very fond of her, to Arthur's delight.

He knew gradually that Mr. Edwardson realized a breach, and was sorry, silently. As time passed the St. Paul's coterie in his class forgot about Judson except when his name appeared on the list of the Princeton base-ball team the ensuing year, filling Eben with pride. His foot-ball career was done; the surgeons insisted on that. He took to spasmodic running and left-handed tennis. But all the

glory of open field, the thunder of crowds, he wanted for Judson. He never saw him play, avoided the games, quite certain that in some way he must come near his beloved and get that horrible smile to burn him again, to render nights odious. He was drawing with regularity for several magazines, and people spoke of his happy treatment of boys or young athletes. He got sizable checks before his graduation, and could give Marie a large cluster of diamonds as a wedding present. They were married three days after his commencement, and lived for eight months in Paris, while he studied under Roll.

Marie's uncle, a Mr. Rand, was attached to the American embassy, and had a house in the Avenue François Premier. He asked the couple to Christmas luncheon, and there, entering the drawing-room, Eben was hailed from the fireside as "Jud" in a broken young voice. This had overtaken him before, but never so poignantly. It was a thin fellow of twenty or so, with a lambent, doomed face, who hurried over, pausing only as Eben colored.

"I'm not Jud. I'm his brother," he said swiftly.

"Oh, yes, the other twin? I'm so sorry. I'm rather a friend of his-Alan Kay. Perhaps you 've heard him speak of me?" he said wistfully, coughing. "You-you live in Pasadena?" Eben remembered.

The consumptive beamed.

"Yes.

I-I 'm on my way to San Moritz. Had a little throat trouble. Jud saw me off." •

"How awfully stupid of me!" said Mrs. Rand. "Here Alan 's been writing me ever since he was a freshman"Before, Aunt Jess," coughed Alan. "Met him out home."

"-about his wonderful Jud Harland, and I never thought to ask. Sit down, Alan dear. This is your Jud's sister-inlaw."

Marie murmured; Eben could see her olive face quiver, and wondered how much she felt while he grinned at Jud's poor friend. He sat down beside the boy and sought a bitter Christmas gift.

galed by anecdotes of the brother-in-law she had never mentioned to her husband. He was bathed in the torturing flame for five hours; then Alan was ordered to bed. "When you write Jud," he said at parting, "say I was n't looking so awfully bad. He was worried about me. And I am glad I met you."

"So am I," said Eben, for it was true. Alan coughed his loyal soul out in the Engadine express, and when Eben heard of it by the infernal French telephone he

the gracious steps of that old, new, noble tower after a triumphant raid.

"Ever been at Princeton, Ria?" he asked her, idly.

"Yes, dear. I went to a dance there, at Mrs. Tree's last winter."

"It's a corking place, Princeton." Then he felt her breathing fast, and was driven to question with all the throbs it might bring on him, "Did you meet Juddy?"

"Yes, dear," said Marie, weakly.

"Did he—” "No, Ben."

She watched him undress in their staid bedroom later, and cringed from his white face. She had the tenderness which seeks an alleviation of any wound and at any risk.

"Ben dear," she whispered, "I don't know anything; but he sent me a pearl pendant, such a lovely one, when we were married. It must have been he. It came from Princeton. It 's in that japanned box."

Eben bent over the toilet-table, and she saw the muscles of his chest slide and bulge as he stared. Then he gave a soft cry and flung himself down, shaking the little bed and their unborn child.

"He could have written, he could have come!" She heard so much, then she pulled his head to her breast, and hated Judson so that her teeth clenched from jealousy.

"Tell me," she said.

"I can't. I think of it every day; I'll die thinking of it."

So she knew why he had turned so fast from the altar and stared out over the perfumed church, and why his face at the wedding breakfast had frightened her. And she loved him, illogically, more than ever, racked for some hidden hour.

Their boy was born at Mamaroneck, and fat Arthur came out next day with an expensive coral teething-ring.

"Oh, gorgeous!" said Eben. "Jud 'll be crazy over it. Take it up an' see if he yells."

Arthur shifted from foot to foot and twisted his mustache.

"I wrote Jud,” he said.

Eben looked up from the ring and out past Arthur down the melting lawn to the roof of the church where the boy would be christened.

"Thank you. I'd let 's go up-stairs." But Eben and his heir were the only Harlands at the christening. Marie put a jeweler's box and its cup away in her father's safe, saying nothing, and left it there when they moved to an apartment off Park Avenue.

Time passed. Men nodded to Eben in the streets and apologized, saying how much he looked like a young chap at their broker's down-town. He declined invitations to dinners at the Princeton Club. He avoided Wall Street, this easily enough. He had a sweetly painful morning when Marie bore him twin sons, and he was plagued by curly heads seen across theaters, wide shoulders that swung by in the twilight. He bought back Edgar's house near Gloucester, and wheeled little Jud along the crescent beach. His name went into "Who 's Who" before Europe took to war, and he had bad nights remembering Jud's military passion. A great broker smirked to him at a dinner party over his brother.

"Travels for me. Customers think he 's the best ever."

"He is," said Eben, proudly.

They had many friends, dull and interesting, and the babies had the proper diseases of babies, and Eben allowed a pastel of little Jud to appear in a Sunday edition, hoping that the smile for this would have no hate behind it. The daily pain gave birth to a deep ambition. Judson need not despise him. Art harpies shrugged and said he had no "temperament." His studio was as ascetic as a sick ward. Popular actors sent their valets to price portraits, ladies adjured him to give them some little thing for the Belgian relief.

Your

"And I wish you 'd be in the tableaux," said one, "in the Greek scene. brother is, and the pair of you-"

"I'm so sorry," Eben said.

He did not see the Greek scene. Marie did. He knew she would, and that night managed to look asleep when she came home. The photograph in the Sunday paper he laid carefully away in a desk of his studio. No dust gathered on it.

"A man would think you were twentysix hundred 'stead of twenty-six," Arthur complained. "Why won't you go to the Marengo?"

"Such a jam," said Eben.

It would be hideous to meet Judson in a crowd. But he began to feel that he could endure this for the sake of knowing