more pepper?"

After this she took from the bottom drawer of her bureau that
long-forgotten gift from the facetious Dave Cowan. She held the
stockings of tan silk before her, testing their fineness, their
sheerness. She was still meditating. She snapped her dark head, perked
it as might a puzzled wren.

"Certainly, more pepper!" she murmured.

CHAPTER XIV

A world once considered of enduring stability had crashed fearsomely
about the ears of Winona Penniman and Wilbur Cowan. After this no
support was to be trusted, however seemingly stout. Old foundations had
crumbled, old institutions perished, the walls of Time itself lay
wrecked. They stared across the appalling desolation with frightened
eyes. What next? In a world to be ruined at a touch, like a house of
cards, what vaster ruin would ensue?

It did not shock Wilbur Cowan that nations should plunge into another
madness the very day after a certain fair one, mentioned in his
meditations as "My Pearl--My Pearl of great price," and eke--from the
perfume label--"My Heart of Flowers," had revealed herself but a mortal
woman with an eye for the good provider. It occasioned Winona not even
mild surprise that the world should abandon itself to hideous war on the
very day after Lyman Teaford had wed beyond the purple. It was awful,
yet somehow fitting. Anything less than a World War would have appeared
inconsequent, anti-climactic, to these two so closely concerned in the
preliminary catastrophe, and yet so reticent that neither ever knew the
other's wound. Wilbur Cowan may have supposed that the entire Penniman
family, Winona included, would rejoice that no more forever were they to
hear the flute of Lyman Teaford. Certainly Winona never suspected that a
mere boy had been desolated by woman's perfidy and Lyman's mad
abandonment of all that people of the better sort most prize.

Other people, close observers of world events, declared that no real war
would ensue; it would be done in a few days--a few weeks at most. But
Winona and Wilbur knew better. Now anything could happen--and would. Of
all Newbern's wise folk these two alone foresaw the malign dimensions of
the inevitably approaching cataclysm. They would fall grimly silent in
the presence of conventional optimists. They knew the war was to be
unparalleled for blood and tears, but they allowed themselves no more
than sinister, vague prophecies, for they could not tell how they knew.

And they saw themselv