on quickly apologized for.

Still, England wrestled for her life. There seemed to be hardly room
in the papers for the mere names of the dead and the wounded, and
those still more pitiable ones, the missing.

Marie Louise lost many a friend, and all of her friends lost and lost.
She wore herself out in suffering for others, in visiting the sick,
the forlorn, the anxious, the newly bereaved.

The strain on Marie Louise's heart was the more exhausting because she
had a craven feeling all the while that perhaps she was being used
somehow as a tool for the destruction of English plans and men. She
tried to get the courage to open one of those messages, but she was
afraid that she might find confirmation. She made up her mind again
and again to put the question point-blank to Sir Joseph, but her
tongue faltered. If he were guilty, he would deny it; if he were
innocent, the accusation would break his heart. She hated Nicky too
much to ask him. He would lie in any case.

She was nagged incessantly by a gadfly of conscience that buzzed in
her ears the counsel to tell the police. Sometimes on her way to a
tryst with Easton a spirit in her feet led her toward a police
station, but another spirit carried her past, for she would visualize
the sure consequences of such an exposure. If her suspicions were
false, she would be exposed as a combination of dastard and dolt. If
they were true, she would be sending Sir Joseph and Lady Webling
perhaps to the gallows.

To betray those who had been so angelic to her was simply unthinkable.

Irresolution and meditation made her a very Hamlet of postponement and
inaction. Hamlet had only a ghost for counselor, and a mother to be
the first victim of his rashness. No wonder he hesitated. And Marie
Louise had only hysterical suspicion to account for her thoughts; and
the victims of her first step would be the only father and mother she
had ever really known. America itself was another Hamlet of debate and
indecision, weighing evidences, pondering theories, deferring the
sword, hoping that Germany would throw away the baser half. And all
the while time slid away, lives slid away, nations fell.

In the autumn the town house was opened again. There was much thinly
veiled indignation in the papers and in the circulation of gossip
because of Sir Joseph's prominence in English life. The Germans were
so relentless and so various in their outrages upon even the cruel
usages of combat that the soun