The Hidden Places

When Hollister returns from World War I, he is officially dead. He was so reported, so accepted 18 months earlier. His wife married again. She and her husband vanished from England. And with his wife vanished his assets, his estate, by virtue of a pre-war arrangement which he never revoked. He wanders the streets of London, one of innumerable stray dogs, ruined, deserted, disfigured, a bit of war's wreckage. He does not exactly consider himself a victim of injustice. He does not blame Myra, his ex-wife. He is simply numbed and bewildered. But then he grows conscious of what it means to a sensitive man, a man in whom all warm human impulses flows so strongly, to be penniless, to have all the dependable foundations of his life torn from under his feet, to be so disfigured that people shuns him. He has to gather up the broken pieces of his life, fit them together, go on as best he could. Will he ever be able to resume where he left off before the war and find true love again?