er to touch! This girl, whom he had pitied for her
loneliness--this woman who had ridiculed the life of England and declared
that it was stifling her--had said that the glory of war was in her
blood. She had called him a fool because he dared to say that carnage
was wrong. He had thought her an advanced thinker; she was a reactionary
of the most pronounced type.

A feeling of fury whipped his pulses. Confound her and her unbridled
tongue! What a fool he had been to woo her! One might as well try to
coax a wild horse into submission. She would have to be conquered; she
should be brought into subjugation by the stronger will of a man, for
only through surrender would she achieve her own happiness. At present
she resented equally the conquering of herself physically and mentally.
For her own sake she must be taught the perversion of her outlook on life.

And Austin Selwyn, the idealist, little thought that he was applying to
Elise Durwent the same philosophy as Prussia was applying to Europe.

But of one thing he was certain--much as he loved her (and at the thought
his heart grew heavy with longing), his words on war had not been the
idle declaimings of a sophist. There was a higher citizenship; the world
was wrong to allow this war; and ignorance was the foe of mankind.

He would not withdraw from that platform. Duty was not something from
which a man could step lightly aside. All his writings, all his
thoughts, all his half-worked-out philosophies had been but training for
this great moment. And now that it had come he would not prove renegade.

He would write with the language of inspiration. The agony of Man would
be his spur, so that neither fatigue nor indifference could impede his
labours. With the tears of the world he would pen such works that people
everywhere would see the beacon-light of truth, and by it steer their
troubled course.

Five miles he covered in little more than an hour, and with the returning
sense of strength his purpose grew in firmness.

The call of the Universal Mind had penetrated through the labyrinth of
life as the sound of the hunting-horn through leafy woods. There must be
millions, he knew, who were of that great unison, kept from _ensemble_ by
the absence of co-ordination, by the lack of self-expression. It might
not be for him to do more than help to light the torch, but, once lit, it
would burst into flame, and the man to carry it would then come forward,
as he