up against Austria-Hungary, and Germany and Russia are
close against the other side. They can get into each other's countries
without much travelling. I heard to-day that Russia will have to help
Servia if she has a row with Austria. Crawshaw says that will give
Germany the chance she's been waiting for and that she will try to get
through Belgium to England. He says she hates England. Harriet began to
look pale as she studied the map and saw how little Belgium was and that
the Channel was so narrow. She said she felt as if England had been
silly to let herself get so slack and she almost wished she hadn't
looked at the geography. She said she couldn't help thinking how awful
it would be to see the German army marching up Regent Street and camping
in Hyde Park, and who in goodness' name knew what they might do to
people if they hated England so? She actually looked as if she would
have cried if Crawshaw and I hadn't chaffed her and made her laugh by
telling her we would join the army; and Crawshaw began to shoulder arms
with the poker and I got my new umbrella."

In this domesticated and almost comfortable fashion did the greatest
tragedy the human race has known since the beginning of the world
gradually prepare its first scenes and reveal glimpses of itself, as the
curtain of Time was, during that June, slowly raised by the hand of
Fate.

This is not what is known as a "war story." It is not even a story of
the War, but a relation of incidents occurring amidst and resulting from
the strenuousness of a period to which "the War" was a background so
colossal that it dwarfed all events, except in the minds of those for
whom such events personally shook and darkened or brightened the world.
Nothing can dwarf personal anguish at its moment of highest power; to
the last agony and despairing terror of the heart-wrung the cataclysm
of earthquake, tornado, shipwreck is but the awesome back drop of the
scene.

Also--incidentally--the story is one of the transitions in, and
convulsive changes of, points of view produced by the convulsion itself
which flung into new perspective the whole surface of the earth and the
races existing upon it.

The Head of the House of Coombe had, as he said, been born at once too
early and too late to admit of any fixed establishment of tastes and
ideals. His existence had been passed in the transition from one era to
another--the Early Victorian, under whose disappearing influences he had
spent