The Lonely Warrior

 On the afternoon of the fifth day of November, 1914, Edward Carroll was sitting as usual in his pleasant inner office, the windows of which looked down upon the middle-western city where Mr. Carroll had lived for forty of his fifty-six years. But he was not behaving quite as usual. At this hour he should normally have been conferring with other men upon matters of importance—matters concerning the cement works of which he was vice-president, or the bank of which he was a director, or the copper mines whose policy he principally determined. Or he should, at the very least, have been dictating replies to half a dozen important letters that had been placed on his desk while he was out at luncheon. Instead, Mr. Carroll merely sat in his chair and stared oddly at a calendar on the wall opposite, as though its large black announcement of the date had some deep significance for him, as perhaps it had.