she did Helen Muir's strongly anxious desire
to keep them apart.

She had seen Donal Muir several times as the years had passed and had
not been blind to the physical beauty and allure of charm the rest of
the world saw and proclaimed with suitable adjectives. When the intimate
friend who was his relative appeared with him in her drawing-room and
she found standing before her, respectfully appealing for welcome with a
delightful smile, this quite incomparably good-looking young man, she
was conscious of a secret momentary disturbance and a recognition of the
fact that something a shade startling had happened.

"When a thing of the sort occurs entirely without one's aid and rather
against one's will--one may as well submit," she said later to Lord
Coombe. "Endeavouring to readjust matters is merely meddling with Fate
and always ends in disaster. As an incident, I felt there was a hint in
it that it would be the part of wisdom to leave things alone."

She had watched the two dancing with a kind of absorption in her gaze.
She had seen them go out of the room into the conservatory. She had
known exactly when they had returned and, seeing the look on their young
faces, had understood why the eyes of the beholders followed them.

When Lord Coombe came in with the ominous story of the assassination at
Sarajevo, all else had been swept from her mind. There had been place in
her being for nothing but the shock of a monstrous recognition. She had
been a gravely conscious looker-on at the slow but never ceasing growth
of a world peril for too many years not to be widely awake to each sign
of its development.

"Servia, Russia, Austria, Germany. It will form a pretext and a clear
road to France and England," Lord Coombe had said.

"A broad, clear road," the Duchess had agreed breathlessly--and, while
she gazed before her, ceased to see the whirl of floating and fluttering
butterfly-wings of gauze or to hear the music to whose measure they
fluttered and floated.

But no sense of any connection with Sarajevo disturbed the swing of the
fox trot or the measure of the tango, and when Donal Muir walked out
into the summer air of the starlit street and lifted his face, because
already a faint touch of primrose dawn was showing itself on the eastern
sky, in his young world there was only recognition of a vague tumult of
heart and brain and blood.

"What's the matter?" he was thinking. "What have I been doing-- What
have I been say