ger improvisations and with vocalists who had
little but their voices left. They howled, "Keep your head down,
Fritzie boy," or, "We gave them hell at Neuve Chapelle, and here we
are and here we are again," or moaned love-songs with a sardonic
irony.

And the guests at tea! And the guests who could not come to tea!

Young Hawdon was there. "Well, Marie Louise," he had said, "I'm back
from France, but not _in toto_. Fact is, I'm neither here nor there.
Quite a sketchy party you have. But we'll charge it all to Germany,
and some day we'll collect. Some day! Some day!" And he burst into
song.

The wonder was that there was so much bravery. At times there was
hilarity, but it was always close to tears.

The Weblings went back to London early and took Marie Louise with
them. She wanted to stay with the poor soldiers, but Sir Joseph said
that there was just as much for her to do in town. There was no lack
of poor soldiers anywhere. Besides, he needed her, he said. This set
her heart to plunging with the old fear. But he was querulous and
irascible nowadays, and Lady Webling begged her not to excite him, for
she was afraid of a paralysis. He had the look of a Damocles living
under the sword.

The news from America was more encouraging to England and to the
Americans in England. German spies were being arrested with amazing
frequence. Ambassadors were floundering in hot water and setting up a
large traffic in return-tickets. Even the trunks of certain
"Americans" were searched--men and women who were amazed to learn that
curious German documents had got mixed up in their own effects. Some
most peculiar checks and receipts turned up.

It was shortly after a cloudy account of one of these trunk-raids had
been published in the London papers that Sir Joseph had his first
stroke of paralysis.

Sir Joseph was in pitiful case. His devotion to Marie Louise was
heartbreaking. Her sympathy had not been exhausted, but schooled
rather by its prolonged exercise, and she gave the forlorn old wretch
a love and a tenderness that had been wrought to a fine art without
losing any of its spontaneous reality.

At first he could move only a bit of the great bulk, sprawled like a
snowdrift under the sheet. He was helpless as a shattered soldier, but
slowly he won back his faculties and his members. The doors that were
shut between his brain and his powers opened one by one, and he became
a man again.

The first thing he wrote with his r