Allston did not propose to submit to any such programme without a struggle. Before such a contingency every sense became doubly acute. He was as alert to sounds as a squirrel. He jumped at every creak, not in fear, but in readiness. The automatic in his hand responded subconsciously, finding direction with sureness. His eyes pierced the dark so that he saw even into the far corners of the room where before he could not see. Once a rat crept out of the hallway and before he knew what he was about Allston had fired--and killed. Roxie sprang up quivering from head to foot, and it took him ten minutes to quiet her. But if Allston was alert to the present, he was even more alert to the future. His thoughts ran ahead like galloping horses in response to the call of new needs. He had, all these years, merely scratched the surface while he thought he had been digging deep into the very bowels of the earth. Before he was out of college he had in an academic way been ready to grapple with life. On top of that he had, through war, been brought into deadly contact with life itself--with what he had considered the big basic elements of existence. He had been plunged from poetry into prose. So he had completed the cycle. There was little left for him to know. His own problem was to classify and card-index his wide experiences--to put them in order for use. Only one element had been left out of the past few years--a relatively unimportant element. That was the element of love--a distinctly peace-time element. He had even touched upon that superficially. And he had more or less expected to go into it more fully at his leisure. But not until the noise of the big guns was out of his ears; not until the ghastly realities had faded away; not until the little mounds had flattened down and the trenches been filled in; not, in brief, until--if ever--he was able to get away from actuality into that pleasant poet’s paradise of dreams. There would be time enough then for the pretty drama of love. So he had thought of it. So he had stepped forward lightly to meet the little winged cherub. So he had challenged him to shoot his swiftest and straightest. Even after he had felt the first sting of the dart, he had smiled on. The wound smarted, but it was by no means serious. Then this night had come--the second act of a whimsical Barrie comedy. There was heightened action at the rise of the curtain, but that might be significant or not. He had held himself ready to laugh at any moment. As the scene progressed, it had not been as easy, but still he would have followed any cue Wilmer had given him up to the moment she lighted her candle and disappeared for the night.