terday's Omaha and Kansas City papers which the
carrier left. In her eagerness she opened and began to read them
as she turned homeward, and her feet, never too sure, took a
wandering way among sunflowers and buffaloburrs. One morning,
indeed, she sat down on a red grass bank beside the road and read
all the war news through before she stirred, while the
grasshoppers played leap-frog over her skirts, and the gophers
came out of their holes and blinked at her. That noon, when she
saw Claude leading his team to the water tank, she hurried down
to him without stopping to find her bonnet, and reached the
windmill breathless.

"The French have stopped falling back, Claude. They are standing
at the Marne. There is a great battle going on. The papers say it
may decide the war. It is so near Paris that some of the army
went out in taxi-cabs." Claude drew himself up. "Well, it will
decide about Paris, anyway, won't it? How many divisions?"

"I can't make out. The accounts are so confusing. But only a few
of the English are there, and the French are terribly
outnumbered. Your father got in before you, and he has the papers
upstairs."

"They are twenty-four hours old. I'll go to Vicount tonight after
I'm done work, and get the Hastings paper."

In the evening, when he came back from town, he found his father
and mother waiting up for him. He stopped a moment in the
sitting-room. "There is not much news, except that the battle is
on, and practically the whole French army is engaged. The Germans
outnumber them five to three in men, and nobody knows how much in
artillery. General Joffre says the French will fall back no
farther." He did not sit down, but went straight upstairs to his
room.

Mrs. Wheeler put out the lamp, undressed, and lay down, but not
to sleep. Long afterward, Claude heard her gently closing a
window, and he smiled to himself in the dark. His mother, he
knew, had always thought of Paris as the wickedest of cities, the
capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people, who were
responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and for the
grinning atheist, Voltaire. For the last two weeks, ever since
the French began to fall back in Lorraine, he had noticed with
amusement her growing solicitude for Paris.

It was curious, he reflected, lying wide awake in the dark: four
days ago the seat of government had been moved to Bordeaux,--with
the effect that Paris seemed suddenly to have become the capital,
no