ss of the Lusitania;
the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all
America was aflame with it. It might mean war. His task had been to pour
out explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an
act of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great ship was loaded
with munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across
a continent. He had worked to his limit. He had taken cup after cup of
coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago. Now here he
was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to
comfort his soul by recalling his own arguments. Never once since the
war began had he doubted the rightness of the German cause. It seemed
only a proof of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now.
Germany was the best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal
nation the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she
should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had the
passion of a mission. The English were indolent, the French decadent,
the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely democratic; the rest of the
world was the "White man's Burthen"; the clear destiny of mankind
was subservience to the good Prussian eagle. Nevertheless--those
wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the eddies of the sinking
Titan--Ach! He wished it could have been otherwise. He nursed his knees
and prayed that there need not be much more of these things before the
spirit of the enemy was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon
the world.

And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.

Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the
conviction that God did not listen to his prayers....

Was there any other way?

It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the
training of all his life. "Could it be possible that after all our old
German God is not the proper style and title of the true God? Is our old
German God perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained
tribal effigies--and not God at all?"

For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that
gathered in the young attache's mind. Until suddenly he broke into a
quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for "Light. More
Light!"...

"Leave him at that," said the Angel. "I want you to hear these two young
women."

The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the m