Over in the barn voices rose suddenly. They were disputing over the cards. There was some one complaining feverishly and some one arguing truculently, and another voice striving to make peace. They died away in a dull hum, and Michael James heard the boy sobbing. "You mustn't do that," he said. "You mustn't do that." And he patted him on the shoulders. He felt as if something unspeakably tense had relaxed and as if life were swinging back into balance. His voice shook and he continued patting. "You'll come in now, and I'll leave you alone there." He took him under the arm. He felt the pity he had for the body on the bed envelop Kennedy, too, and a sense of peace came over him. It was as though a son of his had been hurt and had come to him for comfort, and he was going to comfort him. In some vague way he thought of Easter-time. He stopped at the door for a moment. "It's all right, laddie," he said. "It's all right," and he lifted the latch. As they went in he felt somehow as if high walls had crumbled and the three of them had stepped into the light of day. CHAUTONVILLE[3] BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT From _The Masses_ [3] Copyright, 1915, by The Masses. Copyright, 1916, by Will Levington Comfort. They said that the Russian line was a hundred miles long. I know nothing about that, but I know that it extended as far as the eye could reach to the east and west, and that this had been so for many weeks. But _time_, as it is known in the outer world, had stopped for us. It was now November, and we had been without mails since late in August. Three days of hideous cold had come without warning, and before the snows, so that there was a foot of iron frost in the ground. This had to be bitten through in all our trench-making, and though we were on the southern slopes of the Carpathians, timber was scarce. At each of our recent meetings with the Austrian enemy, we had expected to feel the new strike--the different resistance of German reinforcement. A queer sense had come to us from the Austrians. I had thought of it many times and others had spoken the same: that it didn't matter greatly to them. They gave us fierce fighting, but always when we were exhausted and insane with our dead--they fell away before us. This had happened so often that we came to expect it, our chief puzzle being just how long they would hold out in each battle. Especially when our brigade was engaged, and we had entered into an intensity that was all the human could endure, I would almost stop breathing in the expectancy of the release of tension before us. When it did not come, I invariably found afterward that I was out of perspective with the mainline, on account of the fierceness of our immediate struggle. We were but one snapping loop of the fighting--too localized to affect the main front. The Austrians gave all in a piece, when they drew back.