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Show Julia McFarlane's husband, Richard, disappeared tn World War I, leaving her with two children. She and her father-in-law, John I. McFa.lane, have tried In vain to find some trace of Richard. Twenty-five years later, Rlc Is 27 and serving in the army of World War n, while Jill, 26, professes an Interest In-terest In Spang Gordon, a young lieutenant. lieu-tenant. Julia Is worried about Rlc, who has "washed out" In the air corps, and about Jill, who she is afraid might become an army wife, subject to the ame erlet she has endured. She confides con-fides these worries to Dave Patterson, a family friend who loves Julia but has sever told ber due to her loyalty to Richard. Spang and Jill go to a dance. heavy and dark and sour In his breast. There was so much that he remembered. re-membered. Julia McFarlane, a dancing, copper-headed scrap of fire Julia, seventeen years old and as full of laughter as the little streams that tumbled down the hills recklessly into the river. He had been in love with her thea But Richard McFarlane had had a red-wheeled red-wheeled buggy, and the glamour of sophistication had invested him. He had had some kind of unimportant Job in Washington then, but Dave had known that he was a swashbuckler swash-buckler and a gambler and a liar, even then. Dave Patterson tensed his hands on the reins, so that his horse raised bis-head and snorted. Jill McFarlane, christened Julia, was dizzily, ecstatically happy. The station-wagon was full of rattles rat-tles and lumbered along at a discreet dis-creet thirty miles an hour. Jill nursed a brief hope that her dress wouldn't be ruined by grease or something before she had a chance to dance in it; but this small shadow shad-ow upon the beauty of the night she put out of her mind, because she CHAPTER III Julia's lips quivered; the color came into her face and then receded, re-ceded, leaving it aged a little and Blled with patience. "He was the children's father, Dave. Jill's father. He's more hers than ever now that it's war again. She wears his memory like a decoration. deco-ration. I can't destroy him for Jill. She admires me now. I want her to keep on admiring me. That's selfish, I suppose. But for people with forthright minds like Jill's, the world is pretty well filled with people peo-ple who have to be despised. And of course there's Ric. He worries me. John I. says I've spoiled him, but right now I'm afraid to take anything away from Ric, anything that strengthens him, even a little." "But they know that their father is dead. That's why he's heroic to them, because he's a splendid Idea that never had any substance. II he had come back well, I won't talk about that, Dooley. But you know that we all grew up together I know the kind of life you had with Richard " "Yes, I know. There are things I can't forget, too, Dave. Unpleasant Unpleas-ant things. John I. has been at me (or years to have Richard declared legally dead. But somehow the idea is horrible to me, like opening a grave." "I can't talk to you about it, of course, Dooley. Not that or anything any-thing else that's in my mind so long as you are Richard McFarlane's McFar-lane's wife," Dave said quietly, leaning forward, his long slender hands dangling between his knees. "But I can't agree with you. Your attitude doesn't make sense." "I know. But most of the really important things in life don't make sense." Dave walked the length of the room, his hands thrust into his pockets. "The dead are dead, Dooley. Doo-ley. The decent thing is to bury them and keep your memories. Tell me one thing. Is there any love left in your heart for Richard McFarlane?" Mc-Farlane?" She put her hands to her throat with a young, wistful gesture. "That's unfair of you, Dave. That's a question I haven't dared to ask myself, all these years. I did love him terribly once, and then, after time went on, when there was no word, no record, nothing at all, something bitter that I've fought, with all my soul and all my strength, began to grow In me. I battle it at night, and it's like fighting fight-ing a shadow, but a shadow- with a steely, strangling grip, something you can't touch or see or feel, but can't defeat." "Dooley, you were a child and you (ell in love with a boy. All this morbid stuff a psychiatrist could explain it; I can't. If you were to meet Richard now, suddenly impossible, im-possible, of course, just a figure ot speech but if he were to come back into your life you might be sick with disillusion. You'd discover discov-er that you had grown, you'd know that young love of yours was merely mere-ly one of those wild and pretty fires that flame up before the age of reason rea-son and then die." It couldn't be, but oh, how wonderful won-derful if it were true that Spang liked her, tool Dooley had tried to put caution into her head. "There's a lot of emotion seething in the air In wartime, Jill. Some of it is wonderful and fine, and some of it is a passing fever, a sort of recklessness that leads men to say things they don't really mean and women to believe them. So keep your head, no matter how your heart goes." "I was raised in the military tradition," tra-dition," she told Spang. "My brother broth-er and I were utterly different, but even in those stodgy years when everybody was pacifist and soldiers were tramps In khaki who weren't admitted to theaters or good hotels, Ric and I always marched to military mili-tary music. It was because our father was a kind of special glory that we had, and we hated anything that detracted from his splendor. It's a wonderful thing for a child to have something like that to live up to." "Was he decorated qr something?" some-thing?" Spang asked, steering the slow vehicle around a halted bus. The bus was full of soldiers hanging heads and shoulders out of the windows, win-dows, and some of them grinned and some of them saluted, laughingly, and Spang snapped a salute in return. "Some of our boys," he told Jill. "On their way. Destination Destina-tion unknown." "No," Jill took up the conversation conversa-tion again, wishing they hadn't glimpsed those traveling troops, wishing Spang would not look back at them.. "No, I don't know that he was decorated. My grandfather investigated in-vestigated when the war was over, when we didn't hear anything from my father but he couldn't find anything any-thing at all. But they were all heroes, weren't they?" , "Yes, they were all heroes." A dead soldier was always a hero, he was thinking to himself, a trifle bitterly. bit-terly. "And so are you and all those boys back therel War is a hero's business." "War's a job to do," Spang demurred, de-murred, "a dirty job that takes men to do it. So we go and do it. We don't like it and we growl and gripe, and the enlisted men cuss the officers of-ficers and the officers cuss the politicians, poli-ticians, but we wouldn't miss It, not any of us. But we'll be glad when it's ended and we can go home." "Let's not talk about the war. Though" Jill shivered a little, "there doesn't seem to be very Esiucb else to talk about." "Let's talk about you," Spang suggested. "I know you're Ric McFarlane's Mc-Farlane's sister, but that's all I do know about you, except that you're red-headed and like military bands and dancing." "That's all there is, really. I went off to school, and I wasn't terribly bright, though I finally did grab an A.B. And then I came home crazy to drive an ambulance or join the WAC or something, anything any-thing with brass buttons attached. But my grandfather sat on that idea. You met him old John L He's a unique character. He adores my mother, though he and my father fa-ther didn't appreciate each other exactly, I understand, one of those family things. He lectured me like a top sergeant and said that Mother had had a tough life, and now she needed me around to keep things merry and bright because, of course, Ric would go into the service, serv-ice, so there I am just a home girl. If they keep on taking our men off the place I'll end up hoeing corn and feeding pigs and things." Love Catches Up With Jill "Well, the army eats a lot of bacon. And the navy all those tramps get too fat to waddle off their ships." "You turn here," Jill said, "and that building on the hill with all the lights is the club. Don't laugh at it; it's a funny little place but the people are grand, and we have fun in it. I'll bet I'm the only female dragging an officer. I'll bet I have I to fight off mobs to get even one dance." "Don't try to tell me a lieutenant rates that high! Think this bus will make the hill?" , "It always has. But the big car has practically no rubber, and I put mine up because I felt it was the patriotic thing to do, though Grandfather Grand-father says the deterioration goes right on." "Plenty of cars around here." "People walk for weeks to save enough gas for a party. That's a keen band, but probably half-way through the dance the leader will dash off and enlist in the coast guard." They parked at the end of a line and walked across the mown grass, anl Jill held up her frock and hoped the dew wouldn't ruin her slippers. Probably the dress was sagging again, but that wasn't important now. It seemed a little odd that it had ever been important. The important im-portant thing now was this brief, shining hour she held in her hands. Over its glittering rim into the future fu-ture where ashes of empty days might lie, she would not look. She was going to be happyl She was in love, and no doubt it showed on her, though she tried to keep her gay nonchalance. (TO BE CONTINUED) She had seen bim only twice. was with Spang, and his eyes approved ap-proved her, and life was just now very wonderful. She had met the reality of war with a sinking sense of panic. All the girls of her own age that she knew had been caught up in a sort of whirlwind of despair. "We haven't a prayer!" they mourned. "They'll all go oft to fight, and then when they come back we'll be old maids, and they'll marry girls years younger, kids that are in high school now. It was that way in the last war; my mother moth-er said so." Some of them had already pulled out of the dreary eddy and gone off on mad tangents, marrying men overnight, marrying men they knew little about, men who were changed by the glamour of uniforms, anything any-thing to be saved from being sucked down into the dismal doom of spin-sterhood. spin-sterhood. But something fastidious, something that held aloof, in Jill had made her scornful of these fevered and uricertain escapes. She told herself that she was a mature woman. She was not a silly young thing to be swept away on a tide of adolescent emotion. Her mother had not been eighteen years old. An infant, practically! She thought of the eighteen-year-old girls that she knew and how frightfully fright-fully young and naive they were, and was swiftly sorry for them and for that young and deluded creature crea-ture who had been her mother. Jill Talks About Herself "I liked your mother," Spang said abruptly, as though he had caught the trend of her thoughts. "She's a grand person. And she looks young enough to be your sister." "Dooley's forty-four." Jill was not quite sure that she enjoyed the idea of being Dooley's sister. "She and my father were marriud when they were children practically just before the last war. Then he went to France before I was born . . ." She stopped abruptly, knowing that sooner or later Spang might be going go-ing overseas, too. She could not say "He never came back." Not with Spang so near, not with the lovely present lying about them like an aura of moonlight. "So you were born to the military tradition? The first time I saw you thought you looked like . daugh-tr daugh-tr of the regiment. Something about you-the way you stood so straight with your eyes shining when the colors went by, the way you stood on tiptoe when the band played- 1 knew toat yU belnged ' U'sTeart scudded. It couldn't beihe had seen him only twice. The Girls They, leave Behind I "To ashes? That's what you were f going to say, isn't it? And some- times the ashes are very dark and very bitter. Actually, I'm not cherishing cher-ishing ashes though, Dave. I don't know just what it is I'm keeping, exactly an ember, maybe, that refuses re-fuses to burn out. Of course, if Richard were to come back now I'd probably realize that I've been harboring something unworthy. It would change everything. Don't despise de-spise me for being a fool, please. And don't desert me." He put his hand on her head and roughed her hair gently. "I won't desert you, Dooley. But it doesn't make me happy, seeing you beat Jour head against a stone wall former. for-mer. I'd better go now. I rode and it's five miles back." She said, "Good-by, Dave. John wU be sorry to have missed you. e likes you a lot." And she pressed "s hand. Dave went out, his head thrust I orward a little, as men walk who ; the land best though they may not serve it. He closed the screen without a sound. The horse , red softly as Dave opened the f, ' 'losei it behind him, and slid tal the saddle. J!' 'roUed slowly "P the lane, "18 all the mtle pigs agairli and esca snorted at their scurrying W But Dave leaned forward "addle, and his heart felt i i |