All this while he was looking forward. He was not consciously tired, but he was confused. His mind was in a jumble; filled with detached pictures of training camps, and troop trains, and foul-smelling transports, of strange faces and sights and smells and sensations, with the tyranny of military discipline binding together the titanic whole like the steel bands shrunk around artillery shells. If he talked reluctantly to the eager young women who asked so many questions, it was because he was not yet quite clear in his own mind. That was it; he was not quite clear. And he wished to get clear. The place to accomplish this was not within the four walls of a house, pleasant as the house might be. He needed more room, more silence, more time. He needed the open road, the open sky, and above all an open mind if ever he hoped to get back to straight, normal thinking--the kind of thinking which had characterized the Allstons since Phillip Allston built that fine old Georgian mansion on the banks of the James in 1720 and established the family in America. Ned Allston had always resented the circumstances which forced his grandfather to leave Virginia and those spacious grounds for town life in Baltimore. Allston remained at home a week. Then he packed his suitcase, tossed it into his low gray roadster, waved au revoir to the somewhat anxious group who did not quite understand, and started south. He had no fixed plan. He intended to follow the better roads into Virginia and possibly through Virginia into North Carolina, stopping where it was pleasant to stop, fishing here and there, sleeping and eating a great deal, trying all the time to get his thoughts to run straight so that the world might again appear orderly to him. The scheme worked out even better than he expected. He found it a little hotter than was comfortable, to be sure, but he remedied that by turning west by north and making for the Blue Ridge country. It was all one to him which way he traveled as long as he retained the privilege of traveling in any direction he wished. That seemed to be the one big clarifying idea he worked out on the first lap of his journey. He was now free to free himself and he must guard that freedom. For two years he had been nothing but a pawn moved about by a hand over which he had no control. He had been ordered to go to this place and, snapping his hand to his forehead, level with his eyes, he had gone; he had been ordered to go to that place and, saluting again, he had gone. He had been commanded to do this and he had obeyed; he had been commanded to do that and he had obeyed. And each time he put into the task assigned to him everything that was in him. He stinted of himself nothing. Furthermore, he did this gladly. The cause was worthy of his best.