She wished that Henry would not appear at such mental disadvantage under the penetrating eye of Mr. Marks.

Some time elapsed before she returned to the library, and then she entered just in time to hear Stephen cry gleefully: "I have found it at last! Old Marks would n't tell me where it was. He wanted me to forget, but I have n't." He held up the splendidly bound copy of "Hamlet" which always lay at the righthand corner of the center-table. "Here are the very words he used about Cousin Henry. He said he was not 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.""

Norah received this in silence. Afterward she cried, chokingly, in her own room. She wept with anger, and for Henry's sake, and for other reasons which she did not consciously define.

Mr. Marks had not been in the room when Stephen delivered his blow and this was Norah's only comfort. Her humiliation seemed less for his unconsciousness of it.

PART IV

ORAH was shopping on the historic

N morning of February third. The

downtown streets were cold, crowded, and suddenly resounding with a shout of newsboys which was startling even in those days of startling cries.

Norah hurried to a bulletin board which filled the plate-glass window of the "Herald" office on Tremont Street, and as she stood watching it the historic words rolled into view.

"The President breaks with Germany."

Norah read them with almost obliterating excitement, and for the next few hours her thoughts moved with mighty hosts of world-adventure. She sensed great agonies, conflicts, sacrifice. She walked straighter for being with the Allies, and was passionately glad that her land was at last to share their struggle.

In the afternoon a great American flag blossomed and streamed from the window of the Algonquin Club, and Norah stood under it to see how it felt, while tears of patriotism stung her eyes.

She had not been sure about patriotism during the last few months. It was this sentiment overgrown that had made the world-horror, but now she let her emotions swing free to it, and was splendidly happy. Coming home, she walked under the flag again, for pleasure.

That evening Henry also was radiant. "Little thing, you were wiser than I thought," he said, and kissed her.

Norah trembled with double happiness. It was an hour of high-hearted emotion. The family, including Stephen and Mr. Marks, went out that evening to a lecture by a well-known English journalist. At the last moment Henry had a summons to join a small gathering of citizens who were to start a Public Safety Committee, but Norah went to the lecture without him, eager to see the

streets, and to be close to men on this historic night.

To the throngs of people streaming in and out of the subways and to persons like the Kingsleys, who sat in limousines, there was thrust a strange edition of the "Transcript" -a single sheet empty except for the announcement that Germany's answer to our breaking of relations had been the sinking of the Hoosatonic. This was later discovered to be an unimportant and not illegal episode, but the effect on the masses of amusement-seekers was none the less exciting and the city seemed in the grip of an immense holiday.

People ultimately thronged the theater and lecture hall so that the news of America's step toward war blazed from the newspaper windows upon streets that were empty and icy cold.

In the lecture hall, which was inappropriately open for the discussion of peace, the tutor sat beside Norah.

"Isn't it fun," he said, quoting her

words of the afternoon, - "is n't it fun not to be despised by Europe any more! -to be in the great scrimmage! I feel almost as on the eve of a Harvard and Yale football match, and revel in the sensations of Flag and Country. I am with Barbara Frietchie and all the rest of them. I thought I was more 'grown up'

did n't you? And don't you feel the same way?"

Norah said "Yes." It was novel and delightful to be questioned by the tutor.

When the lecturer characterized the President's message as the "greatest among modern utterances," her eyes met those of Mr. Marks with a glow of triumphant happiness. "All the world will be saying it to-morrow," he whispered, and she whispered back, "We must be more intelligent than most people; we always knew."

This seemed permissible because Henry was with her in spirit to-night. But the next day things changed. It was Sunday, so he could come to her in the