The crowd filed out. The two Warrens were walking down the road. The sergeant had his father’s arm; but his head was up, and it was not he, but the older man, that had the air of being led. For some reason the crowd fell silent. Finally some one said crisply, “Miles Warren always could see straight. And I tell you he can see as straight’s ever, even if he is blind.” —Fisher Ames, Jr. IX—THE COWARD We will call him Albert Lloyd. That wasn’t his name, but it will do: Albert Lloyd was what the world terms a coward. In London they called him a slacker. His country had been at war nearly eighteen months, and still he was not in khaki. He had no good reason for not enlisting, being alone in the world, having been educated in an Orphan Asylum, and there being no one dependent upon him for support. He had no good position to lose, and there was no sweetheart to tell him with her lips to go, while her eyes pleaded for him to stay. Every time he saw a recruiting sergeant, he’d slink around the corner out of sight, with a terrible fear gnawing at his heart. When passing the big recruiting posters, and on his way to business and back he passed many, he would pull down his cap and look the other way, to get away from that awful finger pointing at him, under the caption, “Your King and Country Need You”; or the boring eyes of Kitchener, which burned into his very soul, causing him to shudder. Then the Zeppelin raids—during them, he used to crouch in a corner of his boarding-house cellar, whimpering like a whipped puppy and calling upon the Lord to protect him. Even his landlady despised him, although she had to admit that he was “good pay.” He very seldom read the papers, but one momentous morning, the landlady put the morning paper at his place before he came down to breakfast. Taking his seat, he read the flaring headline, “Conscription Bill Passed,” and nearly fainted. Excusing himself, he stumbled upstairs to his bedroom, with the horror of it gnawing into his vitals. Having saved up a few pounds, he decided not to leave the house, and to sham sickness, so he stayed in his room and had the landlady serve his meals there. Every time there was a knock at the door, he trembled all over, imagining it was a policeman who had come to take him away to the army. One morning his fears were realized. Sure enough there stood a policeman with the fatal paper. Taking it in his trembling hand, he read that he, Albert Lloyd, was ordered to report himself to the nearest recruiting station for physical examination. He reported immediately, because he was afraid to disobey. The doctor looked with approval upon Lloyd’s six feet of physical perfection, and thought what a fine guardsman he would make, but examined his heart twice before he passed him as “physically fit”; it was beating so fast.