been.

Five years in France!--France with its clear sun and lovely moon; its
silver-grey cities, its lilac haze, its sweet, deep greenness, its
atmosphere of living light!--France, the dwelling-place of God in all
His myriad aspects--in all His protean forms! France, the sanctuary of
Truth and all her ancient and her future liberties; France, blossoming
domain of Love in Love's million exquisite transfigurations, wherein
only the eye of faith can recognise the winged god amid his
camouflage!

* * * * *

Wine-strong winds of the Western World, and a pitiless Western sun
which etches every contour with terrible precision, leaving nothing to
imagination--no delicate mystery to rest and shelter souls--had swept
away and partly erased from his mind the actuality of those five past
years.

Already that past, of which he had been a part, was becoming
disturbingly unreal to him. Phantoms haunted its ever-paling sunlight;
its scenes were fading; its voices grew vague and distant; its hushed
laughter dwindled to a whisper, dying like a sigh.

Then, suddenly, against that misty tapestry of tinted spectres,
appeared Thessalie Dunois in the flesh!--straight out of the
phantom-haunted void had stepped this glowing thing of life! Into the
raw reek and familiar dissonance of Broadway she had vanished. Small
wonder that he had followed her to keep in touch with the vanishing
past, as a sleeper, waking against his will, strives still to grasp
the fragile fabric of a happy dream.

Yet, in spite of Thessalie, in spite of dreams, in spite of his own
home-coming, and the touch of familiar pavements under his own feet,
the past, to Barres, was utterly dead, the present strange and unreal,
the future obscure and all aflame behind a world afire with war.

For two years, now, no human mind in America had been able to adjust
itself to the new heaven and the new earth which had sprung into lurid
being at the thunderclap of war.

All things familiar had changed in the twinkling of an eye; all former
things had passed away, leaving the stunned brain of humanity dulled
under the shock.

Slowly, by degrees, the world was beginning to realise that the
civilisation of Christ was being menaced once again by a resurgence
from that ancient land of legend where the wild Hun denned;--that
again the endless hordes of barbarians were rushing in on Europe out
of their Eastern fastnesses--hordes which filled the shrink