Katie had never been more lovely than as she sat there with her hand on the telephone: flushed, stirred, expectant--something stealing back to her eyes, something both pleading and triumphant in Katie's eyes just then.

The man sitting close beside her at the telephone desk scarcely took his eyes from her face.

When the bell rang again and her hand shook as it took down the receiver he lay a steadying hand upon her arm.

At first there was nothing more than a controversy as to who had the line. In her impatience, she rose; he rose, too, standing beside her.

"Here's your party," said central at last.

Her "party" was Wayne.

But something was still the matter on the line; she could not get what Wayne was trying to tell her.

As her excitement became more difficult to control the man at her side kept speaking to her--touching her--soothingly.

At last she could hear Wayne. "You hear me, Katie?"

"Oh yes--_yes_--what is it?"

"I want to tell you--"

It was swallowed up in a buzzing on the line.

Then central's voice came clear and crisp. "Your party is trying to tell you that _Ann_ is found."

"Oh--" gasped Katie, and lost all color--"Oh--"

"Katie--?" That was Wayne again.

"Oh _yes_, Wayne?"

"I have found her. She is well--that is, will be well. She is all right--going to be all right. I'll write it all to-morrow. It's all over, Katie. You don't have to worry any more."

The next instant the telephone was upside down on the table and Katie, sobbing, was in his arms. He was holding her close; and as her sobs grew more violent he kissed her hair, murmured loving things. Suddenly she raised her head--lifting her face to his. He kissed her; and all the splendor of those eons of life was Katie's then.

CHAPTER XXXII

Captain Jones had come down from Fort Sheridan late that afternoon. He had been in Chicago for several days, as a member of a board assembled up at Fort Sheridan. The work was over and he would return to the Arsenal that night.

But he was not to go until midnight. He would have dinner and go to the theater with some of the friends with whom he had been in those last few days.

He wished it were otherwise. He was in no mood for them. He would far rather have been alone.

He had a little time alone in his room before dinner and sat there smoking, thinking, looking at the specks of men and women moving about in the streets way down there below.

He was in no humor that night to keep to the everlasting talk about army affairs, army grievances and schemes, all those things of a world within a world treated as if larger than the whole of the world. The last few days had shown him anew how their hold on him was loosening.

There seemed such a thing as the army habit of mind. Within their own domain was orderliness, discipline, efficiency, subservience to the collectivity, pride in it, devotion to it--many things of mind and character sadly needed in the chaotic world without. But army men lacked perspective; in isolation they had lost their sense of proportion, of relationships. They had not a true vision of themselves as part of a whole. They had, on the other hand, unconsciously fallen into the way of assuming the whole existed for the part, that they were larger than the thing they were meant to serve. Their whole scale was so proportioned; their whole sense of adjustment so perverted.

They lacked flexibility--openness--all-sides-aroundness.

Life in the army disciplined one in many things valuable in life. It failed in giving a true sense of the values of life.

He could not have said why it was those inflated proportions irritated him so. They lent an unreality to everything. They made for false standards. And more and more the thing which mattered to him was reality.

He tried to pull away from the things that thought would lure him into.

He had not the courage to let himself think of her tonight.

He feared he had not increased his popularity in the last few days. At a dinner the night before a colonel had put an end to a discussion on war, in which several of the younger officers showed dangerous symptoms of hospitality to the civilian point of view, with the pious pronouncement: "War was ordained by God."

"But man pays the war tax," he had not been able to resist adding, and the Colonel had not joined in the laugh.

He found it wearisome the way the army remained so smug in its assumption that God stood right behind it. When worsted on economic grounds--and perhaps driven also from "survival of the fittest" shelter--a pompous retreat could always be effected to divinity.

It was that same colonel who, earlier in the evening, had thus ended a discussion on the unemployed. "The poor ye have always with you," said the Colonel, delicately smacking his lips over his champagne and gently turning the conversation to the safer topic of high explosives.

He turned impatiently from thought of it to the men and women far down below. He was always looking now at crowds of men and women, always hoping for a familiar figure in those crowds.

With all the baffling unreality there had been around her, she seemed to express reality. She made him want it. She made him want life. Made him feel what he was missing--realize what he had never had.

It seemed that if he did not find her he would not find life.

She, too, had wanted life. Her quest had been for life--that he knew. And he wanted to find her that he might tell her he understood, tell her--what he had never told any one--that all his life he, too, had dreamed of a something somewhere.

And he was growing the farther apart from his army friends because he had come to think of them as standing between.

During the summer he had seen. In the mornings when they were going to work, in the evenings when they were going home, he had many times been upon the streets with the people who worked. He could not any longer regard the enlargement of the army, its organization and problems as the most vital thing in the world. It did not seem to him that what the world wanted was a more deadly rifle. His lip curled a little as he looked down at the men and women below and considered how little difference it made to them whether rifles were improved or not. And so many things did make difference with them--they needed improvements on so many things--that to be giving one's life to perfecting instruments of destruction struck him as a sorry vocation.

It made him feel very distinctly apart.

He knew of no class of men more isolated from the real war of the world than were the men of the army. They were tied up in their own war of competition--competition in preparedness for war. They were frantically occupied in the creation of a Frankenstein. They would so perfect destruction as to destroy themselves. Meanwhile their blood had grown so hot in their war of competition that they were in prime condition for persuading themselves a real war awaited them. This hot blood found its way into much talk of hardihood and strenuousness, vigor, martial virtues, "the steeps of life," "the romance of history"--all calculated to raise the temperature of tax-paying blood. So successful was the self-delusion of the militarist that sanity appeared mollycoddelism.

Their greatest fear was fear of the loss of fear.

And now they were threatened by colorless economists who were mollycoddelistically making clear that the "stern reality" was the giant hallucination.

It seemed rather close to farce.

That night he was going back. Katie, too, had gone. For the first time that summer neither of them would be there. It seemed giving up.

Loneliness reached out into places vast and barren in the thought that both in the things of the heart and the affairs of men he seemed destined to remain apart.

He looked far more the dreamer than the man of warfare as he sat there, his face, which was so finely sensitive as sometimes to be called cold, saddened with the light of dreams which know themselves for dreams alone.