In the April of 1920, nearly eighteen months after the signing of the Armistice, Tom Whitelaw came back to Boston, demobilized. He had crossed a good part of Europe almost in a straight line—Brest, Paris, Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Fère-en-Tardennois, Reims, Luxembourg, Coblenz—and more or less in the same way had come back again. Now, if he had been able to forget it all, he would gladly have forgotten it. Since it couldn't be forgotten it inspired him with an aim in life.
More exactly, perhaps, it made definite the aim he had been vaguely conscious of already. What he felt was not new; it was only more fixed and clear. He knew what he meant to do, even though he didn't see how he was to do it. He might never accomplish anything; very likely he never would; but at least he had a state of mind, and he was not going to be in a hurry. If for the ills he saw he was to work out a cure, or help to work out a cure, or even dream of working out a cure, he must first diagnose the disease; and diagnosis would take a good part of his lifetime. He was twenty-three, according to his count, but, again according to his count he had the seriousness of forty. With the advantage of a varied experience and an early maturity, he had also that of age.
His achievements in the war had given him the kind of importance interesting to newspapers. They
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 had begun writing him up from the days of the action at Belleau Wood. His picture had appeared in their Sunday editions as on the staff of General Pershing during his visit to the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. To Tom himself the only satisfaction in this was the possible diminishing of the distance between him and Hildred Ansley. It would not have been the first time in history when war had helped a lover out of his obscurity to put him on the level of the loved one. To Hildred herself it would make no difference; but by her father and mother, especially by her mother, a son-in-law who had worn with some credit his country's uniform might be pardoned his presumption.
Public approval also brought him one other consideration that meant much to him. The man who thought he might be his father wrote to him. He wrote to him often. He wrote to him partly as a friend might write, partly as a father might write to his son. Between the lines it was not difficult to read a yearning and sense of comfort. The yearning was plainly for assurance; just as plainly the sense of comfort lay in the knowledge that somewhere in the world there was a heart that beat to the measure of his own. It was as if he had written the words: "My two acknowledged children are of no help to me; my wife is crushed by her sorrow; you and I, even if there is no drop of common blood between us, understand each other. Whether or not we are father and son, we could work together as if we were."
The letters were full of a fatherly affection strange in view of the slight degree of their acquaintanceship.
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 The man's heart cleared that obstacle with a bound. Tom's heart cleared it with an equal ease. To be needed was the call to which, with his strong infusion of the feminine, he never failed to answer instantaneously. As readily as the banker divined him, he divined the banker. If there was no fatherhood or sonship in fact there was both sonship and fatherhood in essence.
Whitelaw wrote as if he had been writing to his boy for years, with a matter-of-course solicitude, with offers of money, with scraps of news. He talked freely of the family, as if Tom would care to hear of them. A few words in one of his letters showed that he knew more than Tom had hitherto supposed.
"If Tad and Lily have been uncivil to you it was not because of personal dislike. In their situation some hostility toward the outsider, as they would call him, whom they might be forced to acknowledge as their older brother must be forgiven as not unnatural."
During all the three years of Tom's soldiering this was the only reference to the question that had been left suspended by the war. Whether or not it would ever be taken up again Tom had no idea. He hoped it would not be. For him an undetermined situation was enough.
Though during this period Henry Whitelaw was frequently in London and Paris they never met. When the one proposed that he should use his influence to get the other leave, Tom thought it wiser to stay, as he expressed it, on the job. Only once did he ask permission to run up for forty-eight hours to Paris, and that was to see Hildred.
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She was then helping to nurse Guy, who, while working with the Y.M.C.A., had come down with typhoid fever. Convalescent by this time, he would sail for America in a month or two, Hildred going with him. Tom himself being on the eve of marching into Germany, the moment was one to be seized.
They dined in a little restaurant near the Madeleine. With the table between them they scanned each other's faces for the traces left by nearly two years of separation. Except that she was tired Tom found little change in her. Always lacking in temporary, girlish prettiness, her distinction of line and poise was that which the years affect but slowly, and experience enhances. He could only say of her that she was less the young girl he had last seen in Boston, and more the woman of the world who, having seen the things that happen as they happen most brutally, has grown a little heartsick, and more than a little weary.
"It's all so futile, Tom. It's such waste. It should never have been asked of the people of the world."
His lips had the dim disillusioned smile which had taken the place of the radiance of even a year or two earlier.
"What about the war to end war? What about making the world safe for democracy?"
She put up a hand in protest. "Oh, don't! I hate that clap-trap. The salt which was good enough to put on birds' tails is sickening when you see the poor creatures lying with their necks wrung. Oh, Tom, what can we do about it if we ever get home?"
"Do about what?"
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"About the whole thing, about this poor pitiful, pitiable human race that's got itself into such an awful mess?"
"The human race is a pretty big problem to handle."
"Yes, but you don't think the bigness ought to stop us, do you?"
"Stop us from—?"
"From trying to keep the world from going on with its frightful policy of destruction. Isn't there anyone to show us that you can't destroy one without by that much destroying all; that you can't make it easier for one without by that much making it easier for everyone? Are we never going to be anything but fools?"
His dim smile came and went again. "We'll talk about that when I get home. We can't do it now. Even if we could it's no us trying to reason with a world that's gone insane. We must let it have time to recover. I want to hear about you."
She threw herself back in her chair, nervously crumbling a bit of bread. "Oh, I'm all right. Never better, as far as that goes. I've only grown an awful coward. Now that the fighting's over I seem to be more afraid than when it was going on. As far as pep goes I'm a rag."
"It'll do you good to get home."
"Oh, I want to get farther away than home. I want to get somewhere—to a desert island perhaps—where there won't be any people—"
"None?"
"Oh, well, dad and mother and Guy and—"
"And nobody else?"
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"Yes, and you. I see you want me to say it, so I might as well. I want you there—and then nobody else—not a soul—not the shadow of a soul—except servants, of course—"
He grew daring as he had never been before. "Perhaps before many years we may find that island—with the servants all the time—but with your father and mother and Guy as visitors—very frequent visitors—but—"
"Oh, don't talk about it. It's too heavenly for a world like this." She looked him in the eyes, despairingly. "Do you suppose it ever could come true?"
"Stranger things have."
"But better things haven't."
He put down his knife and fork to gaze at her. "Hildred, do you really feel like that?"
"Well, don't you?" Her tone was a little indignant. "If you don't for pity's sake tell me, so that I shan't go on giving myself away."
"Of course, I feel that way, only it seems to me queer that you should."
"Why queer?"
"Because you're you, and I'm only me."
"You can't reason in that way. You can't really reason about the thing at all. The most freakish thing in the world is whom people'll fall in love with."
"It must be," he said humbly.
"Oh, cheer up; it isn't as bad as all that. There's no disgrace in my being in love with you. If you'll just be in love with me I'll take care of myself."
They laughed like children. To neither was it strange to have taken their love for granted, since
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 they had done it for so long. It was as if it had grown with them, as if it had been born with them. Its flowers had opened because it was their springtime; there was nothing else for it to do. It was a stormy springtime, with only the rarest bursts of sunshine; but for that very reason they must make the most of such sunshine as there was. They had not met for two years; it might be two years more before they met again. They could only throw their hearts wide open.
She talked of her work. In her mood of reaction it seemed to her now a stupid, foolish work, not because it hadn't done good, but because it had done good for such useless purposes. A New York woman whom she knew, whose son had been killed fighting with the British in the earlier part of the war, had opened a sort of club for the cheering up of young fellows passing through Paris, or there for a short leave.
"We bucke............