terms for peace, or see the destruction of all that she and the world hold dear. And is there one of us who would not be a partner in her loss?

And the United States? 'God's own land'? Are we forever secure? True, we have little to fear in the destruction of our public monuments, which are rather like the public monuments of Prussia, the ornate edifices and ramping statues of Hamburg and Berlin. It might be a pious duty to let them go. But we have homes, which are as precious to us as were once the devastated homes of Belgium to happy men and women; and we confide their safety to treaties, to scraps of paper, like the one which made Belgium inviolate. If we are in search of life's ironies, let us note that a Roman Catholic Peace Conference was to have convened in Liège last August. So deep-rooted is sentiment in our souls, so averse are we to facing facts, that to-day a 'Peace Meeting' will pack any convention hall in this country. Thousands of Philadelphians assembled to hear Mr. Bryan tell them that 'the brotherhood of man is the only basis for enduring peace among the nations'; and not one of the thousands demanded ways and means. Mr. Carnegie is even now laying down plans for a 'World Peace League,' which shall establish a 'World Peace Commission,' exercising 'undisputed authority,' merging, controlling and operating the fleets of nations 'under such management as the League may from time to time direct.' It is amazingly simple and easy, on paper. Mr. La Follette struck a popular note, and endeared himself to the hearts of his countrymen, when, upholding the neutrality of the United States, he said, "The accumulated and increasing horrors of the European wars are creating a great tidal wave of public opinion that sweeps aside all specious reasoning, and admits of but one simple,

common-sense, humane conclusion, a demand for peace and disarmament among civilized nations.'

To this God knows we all cry Amen. But who is to bell the cat? Neither Mr. Carnegie nor Mr. La Follette has a word to say (perhaps it would be a breach of neutrality) concerning this delicate operation. Who is to 'demand' peace, of whom is it to be demanded, and when is the demand to be made? Why cannot public opinon, which is going to work such wonders in the future, do anything at all to-day? The Hague Conference of 1907 laid down definite rules of warfare, rules to which the nations of Christendom subscribed with pleasant unanimity. They forbade pillage, the levying of indemnities, the seizure of funds belonging to local authorities, collective penalties for individual acts, the conveying of troops or munitions across the territory of a neutral power, and all terrorization of a country by harshness to its civilian population. The object of these rules, every one of which has been broken in Belgium, was to keep war within the limits set by what Mr. Henry James calls the 'high decency' of Christian civilization. Public opinion does not, and cannot, enforce the least of these rules to-day. How shall we hope that it will control the world to-morrow?

If the Allies emerge triumphantly from the war, and England demands the reduction of armaments, then this good result will have been gained by desperate fighting, not by noble sentiments. We, whose sentiments are of the noblest, shall have had no real share in the work. If Germany conquers, and stands alone, a great military worldpower, filled with a sense of her exalted destiny, rich with the spoils of Europe, and holding in her mailed hands the means to enforce her will, is it at all likely that our excellent arguments will

prevail upon her to reverse her policy, and enfeeble herself for our safety? A successful aggressive war does not pave the way to a lasting and honorable peace. This is one of the truths which history will teach us if we read it.

For years we have chosen to believe that arbitration would secure for the world a maximum of comfort at a minimum of cost, and that the religion of humanity would achieve what the religion of Christ has never achieved, the brotherhood of man. From this dream we have been rudely awakened; but, being awake, let us clearly recog

nize that simple and great quality which makes every man the defender of his home, the guardian of his rights, the avenger of his shameful wrongs.

We, too, have fought bravely in our day. We, too, have known what it is to do all that man can do, and to bear all that man must bear; and it was not in the hour of our trial that we talked about bankrupt Christianity. When Belgium with incredible courage defended her own honor and the safety of France, she stood upright in the sight of God and man, and laid down her life for her friends.

ANNE MARMONT, of old the pupil of the nuns, had told her about Andecy: an ancient place, half-manor, half-farm, in the Marne valley, whence you could walk over a wind-swept plain to the battlefields of the Hundred Days.

"The nuns, being exiled, of course can't keep it up any longer, and no one wants to buy. I remember it as a place of heavenly peace though in my day though in my day they used to make the oldest and crossest nun in the order superior at Andecy. However, Madame Françoise de Paule is dead now, and there are n't any nuns anyhow. Do take it, dear. If you want quiet' — Anne Marmont swept her arms out as if to embrace illimitable horizons. 'Nothing but a church-spire or a clump of trees to be seen from edge to edge of the plain. The unstable ocean is nothing to it. And if you want variety, you can walk

over to Champaubert and look at the house where Napoleon stayed, the night before the battle. Riddled with bullet-holes it is. There used to be a foolish ancient there who remembered the Hundred Days. He's dead now, I suppose - but then, so is Madame Françoise de Paule, thank Heaven, and her cane, too. I hope they buried the cane. Do take it, darling. It's dirt cheap, and my dear nuns would be so pleased. They'd probably send the money to the hew Nicaragua convent.'

And Miss Stanley had gone to Andecy, had been conquered by the insuperable peace of the plain, and had set up her little household. No place that she had ever seen seemed so good to wait in. When Edmund Laye came back from the Argentine to marry her, she would submit to London; but al

ready she had hopes of enticing him to Andecy for the honeymoon. The chill of the slow spring warmed her northern blood; she liked the reluctance of the season's green, the roaring fire that met her in the salon, the sharp cold click of her boots on the brick-paved corridor.

She was well cared for: a Protestant and a foreigner, who was, none the less, a mysterious well-wisher of 'ces dames,' she found a shy allegiance springing up about her steps as she traversed the plain. There was always a hot galette for her at 'la vieille Andecy,' an obsequious curtsy at Congy château from the housekeeper who showed with mumbling pride the bed where Henri Quatre had slept; and a welcoming smile from St. Eloi, that holy humorist, in the Champaubert chapel. She sat until twilight, often, on the sinister shore of l'Etang des Loups. Even the legended 'Croix Jeanne,' leaning against its pine thicket, seemed glad of her awkward Protestant dip. It was a good place — and all for the price of a second-rate hotel splotched with Baedekers.

Loneliness, in the sense of removal from the social scene, did not afflict her. She who shrank almost morbidly from human encounters, had no fear of the peasants. Slim, shy, timorous, she felt safe here. Her terrors were all of people and what people could do to her. The plain ignored her self-distrust. Letters came from Edmund, regularly, if you granted the delay of driving to Sézanne to fetch them. The months rounded slowly, punctually, to winter and her marriage. So might a châtelaine have waited, powerless but trusting.

Then, in full summer-time, the lightning struck, choosing again the Montmirail plain, after a hundred years' respite. The first rumors were vague and vivid - all detail and no substance,

like news in the Middle Ages. There was war, and she scarcely knew more. Jacques or Etienne turned over night into a reservist, and departed; but had it not been for that, she would hardly have known. The two maid-servants she had brought with her clamored for Paris; she gave them money and had them driven to Sézanne. After the mobilization they must have got through, for she never heard again. It did not occur to her to strike out, herself, for the capital; for her common sense told her she was better off where she was until Paris had cleared the decks for action. Besides, Paris frightened her. She hated being jostled in streets; she resented even a curious stare.

Old Marie and her husband, with their grandchild, came up from their cottage to the manor to sleep; and with the son and nephew gone, there was nothing for them to do but potter about rheumatically in her behalf. For many days, the click of the rosary was never stilled among the corridors of Andecy.

And still the rumors grew, terror capping terror, until it seemed that even at Andecy blood might rain down at any moment from the arched heaven. At first Miss Stanley forced herself to drive the fat donkey into Sézanne for news a half-day's trip with only more terror at the end. The feeble crowds beset the bulletins posted outside the mairie, and scattered, murmuring their own comments on the laconic messages. Sometimes crones and halfgrown children on the edge of the crowd got her to report to them, as she emerged from the denser group in front of the mairie wall. She did so as gently as she could, for they were all involved: fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, sons, were facing the enemy at some point or other that only the War Office knew. If some creatures had had

nothing to give, it was only because the Prussians had taken all they had, in '70.

There was no insane terror; the people were strangely calm; yet they and theirs had been, of all time, the peculiar food of the enemy, and there was pessimism afloat. The plain was as defenseless as they: its mild crops as foreordained to mutilation by feet and hoofs and wheels as they to splintering shells.

Miss Stanley, who was so shy of unfamiliar action, felt Sézanne too much for her. She stopped going, after a week, and resigned herself to not knowing. She chafed under the censorship, though she knew that Edmund Laye would tell her that it was well done of the 'Powers that Were' to stanch the leakage of news as you would stanch blood from an artery. The General Staff was better off not drained of its vital facts. To be sure, Miss Stanley never read newspapers. Even less, did she subscribe to them. But she longed now for a neutral America, where the extras came hot and hot, where experts of every kind fought out the battles on the front page, and good journalese stimulated the lax imagination.

Her determination to go no more to Sézanne led her for exercise to other quarters of the plain. She would walk quickly, tensely, for an hour, her eyes fixed on a clump of trees or a churchspire far ahead of her at the end of the unswerving road, until the clump and the spire rose up to match her height and she came to the first whitewashed cottage. Champaubert church was never empty, these days, of worshipers who gazed up at gaudy St. Eloi as if he could help. The crops that waved on the old Montmirail battlefield were thinly harvested by women and an impeding fry of children. The steep little streets of Congy were dirtier than ever, and the ducks and the infants

plashed about more indiscriminately in the common mud-puddles. No more galettes at 'la vieille Andecy': the old woman was prostrated by the loss of her reservist grandson.

Finally she gave up the plain too, and withdrew into Andecy itself, waiting, always waiting, for word of Edmund Laye. There had been a touch of loyalty to him in her staying on without plan of escape. News of him would reach her here sooner than elsewhere. If she left, she would be lost in a maelstrom, and might lose some precious word. Until she heard from Edmund of his sailing, or of a change of plan, she would stay where he thought of her as being. When she heard, she would go.

nor

Some atavistic sense in Miss Stanley caused her to look, all through early August, to the provisioning of the masome dim instinct to hoard food, that might have sprung from the heart of a colonial ancestress behind a stockade of logs: premonition against death and savages. She sent old Marie to buy thriftily, making it clear that her fortress was not for herself alone, but for all who might be in need. Together, she and Marie and the granddaughter piled provisions in the empty rooms and the dark cellars; and they lived frugally on milk and eggs and soupe aux choux.

Sometimes she wondered whether the danger was not a mere fixed idea of the foolish peasants who had all been touched in the wits by '70. True, the able-bodied men were gone, but the reports these people brought her made no sense. Their quality verged on folk-lore. Something gigantic was going on, somewhere, but it had nothing to do with Edmund Laye in the Argentine, or with her at Andecy. Paris in danger? Perhaps: but how to take it on their word? Belgium flowing with blood? Just what did it mean?

An aeroplane over Sézanne at dawn? It must often have happened, allez ! The air was never free, nowadays. The Germans in France? They had been seeing Germans behind every bush for forty years. So she talked with old Marie, scarcely sure whether she or old Marie were the fool.

Since the household no longer drove the fat donkey to Sézanne, none of them knew even what the War Office said- unless what old Séraphine from the next farm reported that her granddaughter had heard in Champaubert from a woman whose married daughter had been to Sézanne two days before, could be called a War Office report. And never, from the first, on the plain of Andecy, had anyone understood why. According to the plain, all things were to be believed of the German Emperor, who was usually drunk; but, on the other hand, who could trust an atheist government? The soil of the Hundred Days had never recovered from Bonapartist tendencies, Miss Stanley had often noted; and even old Marie would sometimes mix up '15 and '70. The White Paper - which Miss Stanley had never heard of would have been wasted on Champaubert and Montmirail.

Wonder stirred at last even in old Marie's fatalistic mind at the lack of panic in this shy young foreigner — who could not chaffer, who could not bully, who could not endure even the mimic urbanity of Sézanne. Strange that she should be willing to stay quietly pacing up and down the cobbled courtyard of Andecy for sole exercise! Past mid-August, Marie put a vague question.

"When I hear from him, I shall go, Marie,' Miss Stanley answered. 'But I leave everything here to you and Théophile. The British fleet holds the sea, they say, and I shall be better off in England. I shall surely come back VOL. 115-NO, 1

'Keep nothing. It is all for you who have been so kind to me you and yours. Not a child, not a creature, for a dozen miles about that I would not wish to share with, as you know. But -listen, Marie.' Miss Stanley blushed faintly as she bent her head nearer Marie's good ear.

'It is my duty. My first duty, that is, must be to my future husband. When he returns from America' (she had long ago learned the futility of distinguishing, for Marie, between 'l'Amérique du nord' and 'l'Amérique du sud'; and was patient with her belief that New York was a suburb of Cayenne) 'he will wish me there. He was to have sailed last month. A letter a telegram must have gone astray in the confusion. When I hear, he will doubtless be in England. And when he reached England, I was to go to my friends and be married to him. My heart bleeds for France; but I am not French, and my duty is not here. I am American, you see, dear Marie, and my fiancé is English.'

'Ah!' Marie shook her head. 'My old head is turned with all they tell me, and the buzzing in my bad ear is like cannon. But I had thought that the English, for some reason I do not understand, were fighting with us. They have been telling us for ten years that we do not hate the English - that we love them. And Théophile thought that an English army was against the Germans. But perhaps I am wrong. Monsieur votre fiancé will not have to