said soothingly. "I'm not going to hurt you."

The frown cleared for an instant and the eloquent eyes appeared to smile, as indeed the lad might well have smiled at the thought that any one could "hurt" such a bundle of pain. But although it appeared quite evident that Ruthven did not want morphia, the doctor in his wisdom decreed

otherwise, and the jolting journey down the rough shell torn road, and the longer but smoother journey in the sweetly sprung motor ambulance, were accomplished in sleep.

When he wakened again to consciousness he lay for some time looking about him, moving only his eyes. and very slowly his head. He took in the canvas walls and roof of the big hospital marquee, the scarlet-blanket beds, the flitting figures of a couple of silent footed Sisters, the screens about two of the beds; the little clump of figures, doctors, orderlies and Sister, stooped over another bed. Presently he caught the eye of a Sister as she passed swiftly the foot of his bed, and she, seeing the appealing look, the barely perceptible upward twitch of his head that was all he could do to beckon, stopped and turned, and moved quickly to his side. smoothed the pillow about his head and the sheets across his shoulders, and spoke softly.

She

She

"I wonder if there is anything you want," she said. "You can't tell me, can you just close your eyes a minute -if there is anything I can do."

The eyes closed instantly, opened, and stared upward at her.

"Is it the pain?" she said. "Is it very dreadful?"

The eyes held steady and unflickering upon hers. She knew well that they did not speak the truth, and that the pain must indeed be very dreadful.

"We can stop the pain, you know," she said. "Is that what you want?"

The steady, unwinking eyes answered "No" again, and to add emphasis to it the bandaged head shook slowly from side to side on the pillow.

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The Sister was puzzled; she could find out what he wanted, of course, she was confident of that, but it might take some time and many questions, and time just then was something that she or no one else in the big clearing hospital could find enough of for the work in their hands. Even then urgent work was calling her, so she left him, promising to come again as soon as she could.

She spoke to the doctor, and presently he came back with her to the bedside. "It's marvelous," he said in a low tone to the Sister, "that he has held on to life so long.'

Private Ruthven's wounds had been dressed there on arrival, before he woke out of the morphia sleep, and the doctor had seen and knew.

"There is nothing we can do for him," he said, "except morphia again, to ease him out of his pain.”

But again the boy, his brow wrinkling with the effort, attempted with his bandaged hand to stay the needle in the doctor's fingers.

"I'm sure," said the Sister, "he does not want the morphia; he told me so, didn't you?" appealing to the boy.

The eyes shut and gripped tight in an emphatic answer, and the Sister explained their code.

"Listen!" she said gently. “The doctor will only give you enough to make you sleep for two or three hours, and then I shall have time to come and talk to you. Will that do?"

The unmoving eyes answered "No" again, and the doctor stood up.

"If he can bear it, Sister," he said, "we may as well leave him. I can't understand it, though. I know how these wounds must hurt.”

They left him then, and he lay for another couple of hours, his eyes set on the canvas roof above his head, dropped for an instant to any passing figure lifting again to their fixed position. The eyes and the mute appeal in them haunted the Sister, and half a dozen times, as she moved about the beds, she fitted over to him, just to drop a word that she had not forgotten and she was coming presently.

"You want me to talk to you, don't you?" she said. "There is something you want me to find out?”

"Yes-yes—yes," said the quickly flickering eyelids.

The Sister read the label that was tied to him when he was brought in. She asked questions round the ward of those who were able to answer them, and sent an orderly to make inquiries. in the other tents. He came back presently and reported the finding of another man who belonged to Ruthven's regiment and who knew him. So presently, when she was relieved from duty-the first relief for thirty-six solid hours of physical stress and heart tearing strain, she went straight to the other tent and questioned the man who knew Private Ruthven. He had hopelessly shattered arm but appeared mightily content and amazingly cheerful. He knew Wally, he said, was in the same platoon with him; didn't know much about him except that he was a very decent sort; no, knew nothing about his people or his home, although he remembered-yes, there was a girl. Wally had shown him her photograph once, "and a real ripper she is too." Didn't know if Wally was engaged to her, or anything more about her, and certainly not her name.

a

The Sister went back to Wally. His wrinkled brow cleared at the sight of her, but she could see that the eyes were sunk more deeply in his head, that they were dulled, no doubt with his suffering.

"I'm going to ask you a lot of questions," she said, "and you'll just close your eyes again if I speak of what you want to tell me. You do want to tell me something, don't you?"

To her surprise, the "Yes" was not signaled back to her. She was puzzled a moment. "You want to ask me something ?"

"Yes," the eyelids flickered back. "Is it about a girl?" she asked. ("No.") "Is it about money of any sort?" ("No.") "Is it about your mother, or your people, or your home? Is it about yourself?"

She had paused after each question

and went on to the next, but seeing no sign on answering "Yes" she was baffled for a moment. But she felt that she could not go to her own bed to which she had been dismissed, could not go to the sleep she so badly needed, until she had found and answered the question in those pitiful eyes. She tried again.

"Is it about your regiment?" she asked, and the eyes snapped. "Yes," and "Yes," and "Yes," again. She puzzled over that, and then went back to the doctor in charge of the other ward and brought back with her the man who "knew Wally." Mentally she clapped her hands at the light that leaped to the boy's eyes. She had told the man that it was something about the regiment he wanted to know; told him, too, his method of answering "Yes," and "No," and to put his questions in such a form that they could be so answered.

The friend advanced to the bedside with clumsy caution.

"Hello, Wally!" he said cheerfully. "They've pretty well chewed you up and spit you out again, 'aven't they? But you're all right, old son; you're going to pull through, 'cause the O. C. o' the Linseed Lancers here told me so. But Sister here tells me you want to ask something about some one in the old crush." He hesitated a moment. "I can't think who it would be," he confessed. "It can't be his own chum, 'cause he 'stopped one,' and Wally saw it and knew he was dead hours before. But look 'ere," he said, determinedly, "I'll go through the whole bloomin' regiment, from the O. C. down to the cook, by name, and one at a time, and you'll tip me a wink and stop me at the right one. I'll start off with your own platoon first; that ought to do it," he said to the Sister.

"Perhaps," she said quickly, "he wants to ask you about one of his officers. Is that it?" And she turned to him.

The eyes looked at her long and steadily. and then closed flutteringly and hesitatingly.

"We're coming near it," she said,

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"although he didn't seem sure about

that 'Yes.'"

"Look 'ere," said the other, with a sudden inspiration, "there's no good o' this 'Yes' and 'No' guessing game; Wally and me was both in the flagwagging class, and we knows enough to there you are." He broke off in triumph and nodded to Wally's flickering eyelids, that danced rapidly in the long and short of the Morse code.

"Y-e-s. Ac-ac-ac.”

"Yes," he said. "If you'll get a bit of paper, Sister, you can write down the message while I spells it off. That is what you want, ain't it, chum ?"

The Sister took paper and pencil and wrote the letters one by one as the code ticked them off and the reader called them to her.

"Ready. Begins!" "Go on, Miss, write it down," as she hesitated. "DonI-Don-Did; W-E-we; Toc-ac-K-Etake; Toc-H-E-the; Toc-R-E-N-C-H; ac-ac-ac. Did we take the trench ?"

The signaler being a very unimaginative man, possibly it might never have occurred to him to lie, to have told anything but the blunt truth that they did not take the trench; that the regiment had been cut to pieces in the attemp to take it; that the further attempt of another regiment on the same

trench had been beaten back with horrible loss; that the lines on both sides, when he was sent to the rear late at night, were held exactly as they had been held before the attack; that the whole result of the action was nil-except for the casualty list. But he caught just in time the softly sighing whispered "Yes" from the unmoving lips of the Sister, and he lied promptly and swiftly, efficiently and at full length.

"Yes," he said, "we took it. I thought you knew that, and that you was wounded on the other side of it; we took it all right. Got a hammering of course; but what was left of us cleared it with the bayonet. You should 'ave 'eard 'em squeal when the bayonet took 'em. There was one big brute-"

He was proceeding with a cheerful imagination, colored by past experiences, when the Sister stopped him. Wally's eyes were closed.

"I think," she said quietly, "that's all that Wally wants to know. Isn't it, Wally?"

The lids lifted slowly, and the Sister could have cried at the glory and satisfaction that shone in them. They closed once softly, lifted slowly, and closed again, tiredly and gently. That is all. Wally died an hour afterwards.

H

E HAD been dead several years -how long he himself could not tell. For out beyond there are no hours and minutes. He could only know that he had long been wandering and struggling onward. through formless, chaotic darkness, like a lost man creeping doggedly, sullenly, through a vast, black fog. Many memories of sins seemed to hinder his progress; but these were as nothing beside one great remorse that unceasingly pressed upon him. Of course, it was while in the flesh that he had done this one deep wrong that hindered him so mercilessly. He had met her, the one he loved so passionately, and they had sinned together. In the world he had done much good, and except for the sin mentioned, few evils. When he that is, his soul-had passed out from his body, all had been darkness and chaos, with an immense feeling of weight upon him. He that is, his soul-felt so disturbed, so wretched. It seemed to him that he constantly tugged at these weights that restrained him from moving quickly forward-he knew not where. Why he should go forward, aside from a passionate longing to do so, and aside, too, from the fact that the other shapeless, dark forms seemed to be doing so, he could not tell. All was confusion, bewilderment.

Slowly there came over him an intense feeling of remorse, until it at length grew into a terrific anguish. How he began to loathe himself! All the deeds done back there in the flesh began to appear so petty, so low, so beneath what a soul ought to have done. The pain intensified. Each weight now seemed to take a voice unto itself and to cry out against him. As his consciousness became more alive

-perhaps because of the accusing voices-a new pain appeared-a pain unknown to him on earth-an agony caused by his lack of form. He seemed but a vast, unbounded mass, a chaotic something that incessantly, hopelessly struggled to bring itself together and think! He was abhorrent to himself. Oh, for some guiding, concentrating principle, some spirit that might show him what he could do, what he should do! Then there came to him words he had heard so often in the days of his flesh: "Heaven and hell are within you."

"And this, then, is the hell that all must suffer," he said, or, rather, felt to himself in some confused way. "Only conscience and confusion! It is sufficient, O God, it is sufficient!"

Struggle as he might, he could move but slowly. A desire to sweep on, to flee from the weights and their accusing voices, burned within him, but he observed, in the vague manner that had become so characteristic of him out here, that other souls, or at least formless, gloomy masses, passed him, glided more quickly toward that mysterious goal for which all seemed to long. The voices of his own sins had not ceased; if they would only be silent for just a moment that he might collect his bewildered thoughts! But no; they clamored incessantly. And yet, somehow, he felt that those voices came not so much from his unseen hindrances as from within himself. If he had been in the flesh he would long since have gone mad. They showed him himself with brutal unmercifulness; he realized-oh, how vividlythe loathsomeness of his deeds. The bitter reflection came to him, at length, that if he had never done these things in the old days he might now

have been sweeping forward even faster than some of the silent figures that flowed past him. Yet none of these ideas, he realized, were cleancut, clear; all was confusion and gloomy shapelessness and darkness and silence; for, after all, the voices were silent and not spoken sounds.

Years may have passed thus-or perhaps it was but a moment; he could not tell, out here in his lonely wandering and struggling. He had learned to know fully now what he really was, and all was bitter anguish and selfloathing. The longing for some guiding spirit, some companion light, had never ceased. Suddenly he seemed to burst forth in a cry of agony.

"Oh, that I might find the One who can lead me from this chaos! Oh, for light! Oh, that I might know God! Forsaken! Forsaken Too earthy, too foul to know Him, to recognize Him, even if He stood beside me here! O Spirit, whatever Thou art, forgive, forgive!"

That moment his burden began to grow lighter. Some of the smaller weights seemed to dissolve and pass from him; some of the accusing voices ceased to speak. Then, too, he seemed in some way to be collecting himself— to be finding the limits or boundaries of himself.

"Less of shapelessness, less of chaos!" he sobbed in relief. "And see, too, I move faster."

But still many weights clung to him, and one especially hung like a mountain and clamored without rest. It was the great sin-the deed of flesh with her, the woman he had loved. Filth, foul filth, he muttered; the rotten body led me into this confusion of soul. How can I ever know God? I, unclean, swinish, smelling of the flesh!"

The darkness about him had lightened the least bit. He could not tell why; but he was sure that the other figures now hurrying onward with him -millions upon millions, he thoughtwere more distinct. Each seemed a shapeless gray mass, silent, morose, wrapped within itself, each suggestive of inexpressible gloom. It reminded

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him of a picture he had seen of Indians wrapped in their blankets sullenly hurrying on in a driving storm. Yet, though he noticed these things, he felt more and more keenly the tugging weights and the tireless voices. Ever and anon, however, he realized that some one of the burdens dropped or melted away, and some one of the voices became silent. It seemed to him that this happened every time he gave special heed to some persistent accuser and felt sharp remorse touch him to the quick.

There was some little cheer in all this. "Perhaps," muttered he, "they will all at length go from me, and then I shall know God."

Why this intense passion to know God? He had never felt it in such degree while on earth. Perhaps it was because he had never before realized the absolute necessity for some Guiding Principle.

only

Sure enough, just as he had conjectured, the weights and the voices grew less and less evident, and at length passed away. All? All but onethat sin with her. He tried to reason out the cause for this; why all remorse but this had gone. Long in vain he strove for the solution. Long? It might have been years or centuries, or perhaps just a moment; he could not discover out here where time and space seemed unknown, where soul-experiences existed. At length he began to wonder when she would. die and follow; she had promised at his death-bed to be with him, if possible, after life. Then came a sudden thought a spasm of agony; he seemed almost to stop in his onward. sweep. She-the soul he lovedwould she have to toil over the lonely waste he had traveled? Would she, too, have to struggle blindly on, suffering remorse as he had, crying passionately in her desolation for the great guiding Spirit just as he had cried? Bitterness of bitterness! Would one vast weight like this one about him, one unceasing, accusing voice, forever accompany her? Now indeed had the fulness of his sin come upon him. But