He made light of it. It was nothing much. Very soon he would be quite all right. He had been warned that he might have a recurrence, and that he must when possible be on an upper floor when he slept, because to move jarringly was imperative and he would not have strength to climb. He stepped heavily from step to step and so joggled his circulation back to normal. But that would soon wear off. She was not to worry. Thus he lied gently to ease her mind. He did not want to die like that. He did not want death in any form to overtake him. No. The possibility was sufficient to stir him deeply. He had seen death at his elbow a hundred times in four years. He had done his part, expecting that soon or late his turn would come. It was part of the game. Life came to have little significance to men whose occupation was destroying life and being themselves destroyed. It would have been a simple matter to die in action; merely a moment of surprise, of incredulity, then oblivion. He had escaped death; he had escaped marring. Suffering he could not escape, nor the sight of suffering that wrung him as deeply as his own. He had never been able to steel himself against the sights and sounds of pain. He had never been able to look indifferently on other men's agony. And he _had_ grown indifferent to death. Men are seldom afraid to die, to risk death. Yet with the acceptance of death as an imminent chance there still flourishes the deep, instinctive desire to live. Rod wanted to live more than he had ever wanted to before. He had come through the storm of war to this haven where he knew there was for him peace and security and affection beyond most men's lot. Yet it was touch and go. The nervous man, the keenly strung, sensitive man, the thoroughbred will fight; he can die on his nerve. But there is a breaking strain beyond which he cannot endure. Before the continual impact of pain, death, horror and disgust, the sight and knowledge of merciless destruction, of blind and calculated killing, of flesh and blood ground up and poured into a bottomless pit to narrow a salient or test a military theory, Rod had sometimes wondered if something in his heart would burst; if something in his brain would crack from that inner ache, a quivering sensitiveness that drew his nerves tight as fiddle-strings, a going on by sheer will, with his heart burning in hatred of the bloody muddle that engulfed him and his fellows. His heart had been strained until it weakened somewhere. That was all. He had not known what it was that changed the nervous heart into a weak heart. Some time before the Armistice he noticed the difference,--a slowing-down under excitement instead of a quickening of his pulse. A feeling of discomfort at night. A desire to get up, to walk about, to fight off a weakening sensation.