She laid her face against his breast. Her arms pressed tightly about him. A little shudder shook her. "Oh, Rod, Rod," she whispered. "I can't bear it. I've seen it coming. We've just begun to live. And I'm going to have a baby." He sat holding her close. She did not cry. She clung to him silently. The slow heave of her bosom, the occasional shiver, that desperate struggle for calmness, made him ache. And he thought, with a slowly rising tide of bewilderment, of the wholly inadequate preparation that had been bestowed upon them for such a bitter sip of life's cup. For her a lonely childhood, an education frugally achieved, and marriage. For him eighteen years of a sheltered, tutored existence, four years of college, twelve months in a logging camp, three months of inconceivable happiness--and the war. The Great War--which in five years was to bestow upon his country, at the price of many lives and out-poured treasure, such priceless victories as a scramble for oil and a squabble over debts! CHAPTER XVIII When men walk often in the shadow of death they rise superior to its dread aspect, or they become indifferent to it, or they succumb to its ghastly presence and welcome it as a relief from unendurable suspense. Upon these emotional reagents all the heroism and endurance and cowardice of humanity in war is based. And when the shouting and the tumult dies the survivors sometimes find themselves incredible of their survival in a world excitedly muttering the shibboleths of peace,--peace, where there is only a truce. For the dumb clods, led or driven, and the high-spirited adventurers did not alone comprise the armies which the nations lately sent forth. Willy-nilly, by outward compulsion or inner sense of duty, the sensitive, the lovers of beauty, the humanitarian, the altruist, those strange souls to whom disorder is an evil, justice a passionately cherished dream, freedom the birthright of every man,--they too wore khaki and were deafened by the guns. Upon them, and they are no inconsiderable portion of this our country's manhood, the war has left its mark. Not so much in the scars on their bodies--for those are things men forget as easily as women forget the pangs of childbirth--but in the more tenuous fabric of their souls, in the processes of their intellect. Many question the value of the ordeal,--judged by its results.