was helping it wonderfully, just as the doctor said it might) but even so, he would go to her.
Elizabeth Oliver had not continued her visit at Alice Farnum's long after her last meeting with Vincent. Barbara reported that she had moved on to Atlantic city in her pursuit of pleasure. Vincent had been careful to guard from Barbara's suspicious observation, and his mother's, any word or look that might betray how any reference to Elizabeth Oliver prodded him, hurt him, as time went on, sent a sharp twinge of actual pain through him. He was glad that he had his war-experiences still to hide behind, when the fits of vague longing and depression took possession of him.
One day during one of these fits of depression, some three weeks after the pretty bubble which he and Elizabeth Oliver blew with childish joy, had burst upon the hill-top, Vincent found himself pulling the Farnums' front door-bell. He hadn't called on Alice Farnum since prep-school days. Of course she would tell Barbara. Of course in short time every one would know that the purpose of that call was to talk about Elizabeth Oliver. Vincent had little hope that Alice could help him—could erase from Miss Oliver's name the stigma of slacker, of butterfly, of flirt. All these
