"Oh, does n't he!" Wildfire tossed back her mane. "You know perfectly well father's discretion is only just at the first shock of any piece of news. He thinks he 's done all he 's called on to do when he does n't tell us that minute. If you wait, you 're safe to hear what it's all about."

"My dear Madge!" said Miss Greta, sweetly. It was taking her a long time to verify that address.

Patience incarnate at the telephone having refused to deal with two underlings in turn, waited now for the stationmaster to be fetched.

"Is that the station-master? Well, look here, is the new express running yet? Yes; what time? I 'm speaking from Kirklamont for Sir William McIntyre. He He must catch that train. Yes, motoring to -Yes. You could hold it a minute or two, I suppose, if— All right." He had no sooner rung off than he rang on. "Give me the motor-house."

And still Miss Greta sat there till she heard that the new car was to come round in time for Sir William to catch the four o'clock express at the junction.

As Napier rang off again, his chief was back in the hall, giving directions to a servant about packing a traveling-bag. Sir William's family appeared not the least excited at the prospect of the sudden journey. They were too well accustomed to his bustling ways. But Sir William himself had the air of being even more wrought up, now that he 'd had time to think over his news, than he had been on receiving it. He stood working his eyebrows and frowning as the conversation in the hall died down, and the company waited for the enlightenment which Madge had foretold

was sure to come.

"Madness!" He flung it out to an invisible audience. "Madness!"

"Oh, Ireland!" said Lady McIntyre, certain of the inevitable connection. "Ireland? Not at all. Austria." Miss Greta, her envelop in hand, had turned about in her chair and looked over the back of it, her round head slightly on one side in an attitude of polite attention. Very different from the form adopted by

the ladies of Sir William's own family, secure as they were in their knowledge that Sir William would unburden himself.

They seemed disposed to look upon the news, when it did come, as something of an anticlimax; for Sir William preceded his launching of the fact with an increased activity of eyebrow and a furious jingling of seals.

"Austria," he said, "has sent an ultimatum to Serbia!"

"Oh, is that all?" Lady McIntyre's last lingering fear was laid to rest.

"Couched in such terms," Sir William went on, "as no self-respecting nation could accept."

Miss Greta's air of elaborate deference suffered no change. She heard that the Austrian Government was plainly composed of a set of Bedlamites, "scratching matches in a powder-magazine."

Sir William seemed to have his excitement, his anxiety, all to himself till Mr. Grant came in with Nan Ellis. Even then Sir William had only one person with whom to share the graver implications in the news.

You'd say Julian neither heard nor saw the girl he had been frankly adoring as they came in. Question after question he fired at Sir William rather as though that gentleman were responsible for the impasse. "What! Serbia is to take it or leave it en bloc by to-morrow night? Why, that means there 's less than twenty hours between Europe and-" He stopped, appalled.

"Europe?" said Miss Greta, gently. "You mean Serbia."

The butler came in with the belated papers.

Sir William snatched up "The Times." Sir William glanced quickly at headlines.

"They don't make much of it," Napier said.

"Naturally," Miss Greta excused them. "They are full of their own difficulty."

"What do you call their own difficulty?" Napier asked as he paused to turn the paper.

"Why, Ireland," she answered promptly. Napier found himself looking at her.

"There are some sane people even in Ireland," Sir William threw out over the top of his paper; "but this-this Austrian madness-no warning, no parley; a pistol to Serbia's head!"

Julian's voice overtopped Sir William's. "It amounts to the abject humiliation of Serbia-or war."

"Serbia will accept Austria's terms," said Miss Greta, quietly.

"Never!" cried Julian. "All the chancelleries of Europe will join in protest."

Sir William paused in his trot up and down that end of the hall.

"If Russia goes in, Germany can't stay This time to-morrow Europe may be ablaze."

out.

The supposition, sounding through those piping times of peace, rang fantastic. Napier remembered long after how he had looked round Kirklamont Hall, and saw that outside Sir William there was n't a soul there who believed in the possibility of war except one. That one was Miss Greta.

"Monstrous as it would be to force Serbia into political slavery," Julian admitted gravely, "there would be one thing worse." Nan at last lifted her voice.

"What would the worst thing be?"
"War," answered Julian.

"What! what!" Sir William caught him up. "There are worse things than war, young man."

"There's nothing worse than war. Fortunately, we 've reached a place where the mass of the people know that."

As the awful prospect unfolded, people were not appalled, though they said they were. They were n't even unhappy. They were far too excited. And to be excited about matters of world-wide importance is to be lifted out of the petty round and to catch at the crumbs of greatness.

Napier went up to town with Sir William. At close quarters with official minds the younger man shared those hours of anxious hope bred by the earlier interchange between Petrograd and Berlin, London and Belgrade.

Still, and without ceasing, though too

late, as was seen in the retrospect, England worked for peace.

Not even the formal declaration of war on Serbia made by Austria on the Tuesday following that fateful Friday arrested the effort of the British Government to avert the catastrophe.

Five days after the ultimatum discussion in Kirklamont Hall the German demand was made for British neutrality, and the first shots were fired at Belgrade.

Julian's letters in those days registered merely the seething and boiling in the caldron of his separatist soul. His horror of the Mitteleuropa plot, as it began to unroll, was lost in his horror of the spread, the deliberate inflammation, of what he called the "war cancer."

Napier flung the letters into the wastepaper basket and forgot them; but as he went about his work transmitting cryptic telephone calls or hurrying to and fro with confidential messages, all incongruously a girl's face would flicker before him like a white flower before the eyes of one running at top speed through danger-haunted woods at night.

Those were the hours when Great Britain was pressing the most momentous question ever framed by diplomacy: Was France, was Germany, going to respect the neutrality of Belgium? Then came the moment when France cried, "Yes," and Germany's silence was louder than roar of cannon in the instructed ear.

Sir William had sat in the war councils, and hour after hour sat in smaller groups, laboring with the best minds to find a way to stay the spread of the contagion. When Sir William came to a place where nothing more could be hoped for or immediately. be done, he found that for the first time in his life he was unable to sleep. Country air, home, if only for a round of the clock.

They came back to Kirklamont to find, in outward seeming, all unchanged. The fact struck sharply on the strained sense of the two men who drove up from Inverness toward noon on the first Monday in that fateful August. Late Saturday night. Germany had declared war on Russia, and France was already invaded.

"William dear! And what's the news?" Madge ran, her red hair all abroad, to embrace her father. Bobby, on the point of going up-stairs, changed his mind instead. He waited to hear the news.

Sir William met interrogation testily. Napier's first impression on entering the hall had been of the still intensity of Miss Greta's gaze; perhaps he was the more struck by it because it was n't on himself, but on Sir William. As she closed the book she'd been reading aloud and rose, the look was gone. Amid the heats of midsummer and of war she stood cool, pearlpowdery, sweet, with a smile for Napier now, and an expression of deferential welcome for Sir William. Miss Greta left to other folk all worrying questions aimed at jaded and travel-worn men.

No, Sir William was n't going to sleep till after luncheon. But he was hot and dusty; he would go up.

They would have tackled Napier, but he escaped hard upon Sir William's heels.

As Napier followed his chief down three quarters of an hour later, a laugh floated up. It was Nan Ellis's.

She and Bobby sat on the sofa taking and giving lessons in the tying of sailors' knots. She looked up carelessly enough

at Napier's appearance.

"How do you do? Do you know any good knots? I thought you would n't.”

"She is prettier than I remember," he said to himself.

"Well, then,"-Sir William filled the hiatus with a single sentence, "at seven o'clock on Saturday evening Germany declared war on Russia."

Instantly the hall was full of hubbub. The excitement bred by that tremendous fact reached even Lady McIntyre.

"Dear me! I wonder what the Pforzheims will say to that. They will be astonished."

Miss Greta went through the motions of surprise.

"Has it really come?"

Napier, observing her narrowly, said to himself, "She knew." And then, "How did she know?"

Julian Grant came hurrying in with absorbed, excited face. Before he had spoken to anybody else or so much as looked at Nan, he said:

"Tell us, Sir William, it 's only in the country, is n't it, that people are talking wildly about England being mixed up in this horrible business?"

"People talk everywhere," Sir William said crustily.

After Sir William's rebuff, Julian had gone over and sat down by Nan. It was Miss Greta who did the talking.

Napier saw her leaning across Nan to engage Mr. Grant. Most gentle she was, ingratiating. As he strolled nearer, Napier heard one or two of her leading questions, put with an air of having no idea how straight they went to the heart of the

matter.

“Oh, you think that? I should so like to know why."

Sir William, pretending not to listen,

"What 's this about the papers?" His raised voice commanded the hall.

"Yes, my dear William; for the third time. That was why we had to try to get our news from London. But they were horrid yesterday about telling us anything. It's not very pleasant,"-Lady McIntyre revealed her conception of the use of war news,-"when neighbors call, expecting us to know the latest, and find we have n't heard a word since Saturday morning."

neither of Julian's denunciation of the idea of England's interfering nor of Miss Greta's "Well, it would be quixotic. And whatever her enemies may say, England is not quixotic." It was the kind of little compliment with a sting in its tail that Miss Greta could deliver with an innocence that must, Napier decided, console her for many an enforced piece of selfsuppression.

""Quixotic!'" Julian began to tell how much worse it would be than that.

Fury rose in Sir William. Napier saw it getting into his eyebrows. Miss Greta saw it, too, Napier could have sworn. Oh, she knew perfectly what she was about.

"It is difficult," she supplemented Julian's assurance, "very difficult, to see how England could come in, with civil war ready to break out at any minute. She would be sacrificing herself for-what?" Miss Greta insisted in her suave voice.

"The statesman who would advocate it," said Julian, "would be committing suicide."

Sir William swung round.

"You 're wide enough of the mark this time."

"Our obligations to France-" Sir William began.

"What obligations?" the young man demanded. "The country has n't indorsed any obligations." He jumped up and faced Sir William on the hearth-rug. "If behind our backs they 've gone and committed us-" Julian's dark eyes flashed a threat of dire reprisal. Provisionally he wiped the floor with those (including, all too flagrantly, the Laird of Kirklamont) who might, "in their colossal ineptitude, want to commit this nation to war.'

"That 's your opinion," said Sir William, growing bright-red under the friction. "You seem to think we have no right to ours."

Julian halted an instant before the problem.

"How much right has a man to the wrong opinion?" Upon the answer to that, he knew, had hung much of the history of politics and religion. In another mood Julian would have maintained till all was blue that an intelligent bricklayer had as much right to a voice in the policy of the country as a peer of the realm. None the less, in his heart of hearts, as Napier was whimsically aware, Julian felt that, for all Sir William's official position, he had n't any such valid right to press his views. as had a Grant of Abergarry. Between mirth and consternation, Napier realized that this was the key to the renewed outpouring. It was not so much Julian, but a

Grant, very properly telling a McIntyre things good for him to know.

In the heat and fury of the discussion that she had so adroitly precipitated Miss Greta stretched out a hand and took up her knitting. She sat there with bent head.

"Who? The democracy of England!" Julian was crying to Sir William's angry, "Who is going to prevent?" "If politicians don't know that, they 'll learn it to their cost. English participation in this war is impossible."

"Ah, so little impossible," Sir William barked back, "that we 'll be in it up to the neck!"

There was a moment's hush in the hall before everybody except Miss Greta began to talk at once. Miss Greta never lifted her head. She did not so much as lift her eyes. Napier saw that she was following the success of her ruse with an intensity that held her hands immovable, as though the rapid fingers had been caught, tied fast in those "field-gray" filaments that she wove; as though her palms had been skewered through by the shining steel of her long needles. They stuck out at right angles, seeming to transfix the rigid, death-white hands.

"Never! never!" Julian had cried out at the top of his voice.

"And if we were n't in it," Sir William shouted, "we 'd be wiped off the map. What's more, we 'd deserve to be."

"I tell you," Julian vociferated, "England will never consent to be dragged into this quarrel."

"England won't be dragged in. She will go in because it would be shame to keep out. She is in!"

The shell-shock of Sir William's bomb had shaken even Greta von Schwarzenberg. From that first impact she recovered her mental poise at a price. Her face was white with the cost of it, or under the tension of some immediate decision. It suddenly came over Napier: she wants more than anything on earth to warn the Pforzheims.

She made a slight movement. It brought the clock within range. Five minutes to luncheon-time. "Five minutes," Napier