"Would I go?" Jim was asking himself in cold honesty. He thought he would. Certainly if he were needed. But he didn't feel that youngster's leaping flame of adventure. . . . He saw the damnable consequences of the thing too clearly. Dirt and vermin, barbed wire and gas... he was thinking very soberly of these things while the talk rolled on.

When suddenly he attended to it again he heard the white-haired man speaking.

"No, the country isn't ready for war yet," he was pronouncing. "The people have to get this thing clearer there will not be wanting agitators to tell the man in the street that he is going to war for the rich man's right to travel."

"With Bryan urging us to stay home!" said the fiery man with an angry laugh. "Abandon your rights, abandon the highways, abandon the men away from home but race for your cellars, Americans! By and by the Germans may let you come up and go about your honest business-perhaps! Gad, that fellow makes me sick!"

"This business has done one thing for the country-it has shown him up," said Jim slowly. "A man who isn't ready to sacrifice what his forefathers sacrificed for the liberty which he enjoys"

He stopped, feeling that he was talking like a Declaration of Independence. But suddenly he felt that he would like to be shouldering a gun, marching towards the trenches that were keeping his world free.

"And what his foremothers sacrificed," the boy's mother added in a quiet voice.

"There's a presidential election coming on next year,' the white-haired man was saying thoughtfully. “We've got to have a tried man in the saddle

The group began to talk of politics and Evelyn Stanley

detached herself and with Jim at her side went towards the dining room.

"Do you think we ought to go to war?" he asked her. She turned a troubled face toward him. "How dare I say? If I, myself, could fight-yes! But since I should be safe at home-it's the tragic finality of it that appalls me!" she broke out. "War can crush this horror and prevent its ever happening again, perhaps, but it can never bring back all the dead and undo the destruction. . . . When they talk of terms of peace I think of all those ruins that were the happy villages that I saw two years ago, and I think of the ruined lives and the dead bodies in the fields . . . no peace can restore those things that are gone!"

"Those that are gone are out of it," said Jim slowly. "There is no other comfort

"And the Lusitania! I keep thinking that those people are drowned-drowned-and dead-and some of them I said good-by to! You know I was working with Madame Depage, the Belgian Red Cross agent . . . and there were others. But it isn't only the ones I knew. It's the babies

Jim was silent.

"That dead woman that was washed ashore upon the Irish cliffs," said Evelyn almost inaudibly, "with her two little babies drowned in her rigid arms

"You mustn't think of that--"

"And they have a medal in praise of it in Germany!" She turned darkening eyes upon him. And the pain and bewildered hurt in those eyes reminded him of that young girl who had turned from the beaten horse, that long ago day in Amherst, asking of him and the world why there should be such pain and hurt in it.

He had thought her such delicate, tender stuff!

Strange that through her soft, pitying youth had come to him such a stark, irremedial wound..

"I wish that I could go to France and work," Evelyn went on. "But Christopher's not strong. And he doesn't think it our affair, anyway-of course he wants to help," she flung in quickly, as if her feeling had betrayed her. And the consciousness of Christopher's name between them brought a quick, enveloping restraint.

"Financial help is what France needs now as much as anything," Jim responded evenly.

“I know. . . . They are talking of a huge Allied Bazaar here for next winter. We must make that go," she answered, but the spontaneity had gone out of her.

The idea came to Jim that the young and beautiful Mrs. Stanley who aided bazaars and prompted charities looked suddenly a little drooping.

It was a remarkably unwise idea to get into his head. It tempered his light, protective irony. It tugged, insidiously at memory and suggestion. . . .

And, undeniably, there were shadows under Evelyn's eyes, and those eyes, themselves, when not lighted in talk, held a strange and touching wistfulness. . . . They were the eyes of a child, unlit with expectation.

And very uselessly for that hard-won peace of mind of his, he began to wonder about her life with Christopher.

CHAPTER XXVII

REVELATIONS

EXACTLY one year later he was facing her across a tea table at the Blackstone.

It was of her initiative, that meeting. She had suggested lightly that he take her to tea some day where they could have a real talk, and with a secret irony he elected the day that was the very anniversary of that extraordinary expedition to the dunes.

Six years ago. . . . Six years. . . . And how little he had expected, in those passionate hours, that he would ever be sitting here at tea with her, quietly, warily even, without heart-rack-actually, calmly, egotistically proud of the society of so beautiful a young woman.

He wondered very much what she wanted of him. . . Biography, apparently.

"Tell me about yourself, Jim," she began. "I really want to know."

"What about myself?"

"Oh-the law-and everything. How did you happen with Walter Hinman? I thought when" she hesitated, then came out clearly, "when I was married that you were in some other firm-I forget the name."

"I was in a partnership with Mortimer Preebles." Jim always smiled a little sardonically at the memory of that partnership. He never felt so free a man as when he recalled that parting of the ways.

"Mortimer Preebles?" The name struck Evelyn into

a swift astonishment. "Why, I thought that you that he"

"Yes?"

"I thought you weren't very good friends."

"We aren't-now."

"But then, I thought-" a swift recklessness seized upon her "I thought he disapproved terribly of youof your wild ways, you know."

"My wild ways?" Jim stared oddly. "My dear Mrs. Stanley, I have no wild ways. If you will pour my tea -and perhaps tell me what you mean

Evelyn poured his tea. She poured her own and took a scalding sip of it with lips unmindful of the heat. "I mean a perfectly horrid old story," she said, "about you at a dance hall with some dreadful

woman

"But I never took a dreadful woman to a dance hall in my life."

"But-but my husband said he saw you-and Mortimer Preebles”

"Good heavens, is that blackguard talking about the time I went on a crazy lark, as an eighteen-year-old boy"

"Eighteen years old?" said Evelyn Stanley in a suddenly faint voice.

"Just that. And there was no real harm in it. . . . I never knew that Preebles saw me. He has never opened his mouth to me. But once, to my sister, he tried to talk So your husband was with him!" said Jim with a short laugh.

"Yes. And he told me-that night I came home from the dunes." Her voice was just audible to him; he leaned closer across the table. "And I thought-I thought it had all happened since you had known me