n, this is your chance," said Eveley happily. "Now I am positively
sure that one of these days you will be a matchless American woman. You
are just ripe and ready for love. You can't escape it, you sweet thing,
even if you could wish. War and horrors were left behind in your old
home. Here in your new home you will know only peace and contentment and
love. Aren't you glad I adopted you? We must give Mr. Hiltze credit for
that anyhow, mustn't we?"

There was a sudden tension in the slender figure at her side. "Eveley,
are you so innocent? Do you never attribute evil motives to any one? Do
you always believe only good and beautiful and lovely things of those you
meet?"

"Well, I have no real reason for thinking mean or ugly things of any
one--not really. I never had any horrors in my life until the war came. I
have just lived along serenely and contentedly, and being fairly nice and
kind, I have no guilty conscience to trouble me, and no one has ever been
hateful or mean to me--not in anything that really counted."

Both were silent a moment, thinking, each in her different way, of the
contrast in their lives. Then Eveley went on, more slowly:

"I feel sometimes that we are living on the crest of a terrible
upheaval--that we are on the edge of a seething volcano which is
threatening and rumbling beneath us, each day growing fiercer and more
ominous, and that presently may come chaos, and we on the crater of life
will be dragged down into the furnace with the rest. I suppose," she
added apologetically, "it is because of the conditions that always follow
a war, the political unrest, the social chaos, the anarchistic tendencies
of every one. I am not in the midst of things enough to understand them,
but even up here on the top of our canyon, we sometimes get a blast of
the hot air from below, and it troubles us. Then we try to forget, and go
on with our playing. But the volcano still rumbles beneath."

Eveley slipped her hand out to take Marie's and found it icy cold.

"Did--did you ever feel so before?" asked Marie in a low strange voice.
"That you were living on the rim of a volcano, ready to catch and crush
you?"

"No, not before. It is just now--after the war. Conditions were never the
same before."

Then Marie burst into a passion of tears. "It is my fault," she sobbed.
"It is because I am here. All my life I have lived in the crater of a
volcano, and I have brought it upon you. It is a curse I carry with me.
I