quiet.

"Perhaps not for a good many nights. He does not know. I must not ask
things. I never do."

"But it has been so wonderful that you know--"

On what plane was he--on what plane was she? What plane were they
talking about with such undoubtingness? Heaven be praised his voice
actually sounded natural.

"I do not know much--except that he is Donal. And I can never feel as if
I were dead again--never."

"No," he answered. "Never!"

She lay so still for a few minutes that if her eyes had not been open he
would have thought she was falling asleep. They were so dreamy that
perhaps she was falling asleep and he softly rose to leave her.

"I think--he is trying to come nearer," she murmured. "Good-night,
dear."

CHAPTER XL

Ominous hours had come and gone; waves of gloom had surged in and
receded, but never receded far enough. It was as though the rising and
falling of some primaeval storm was the background of all thought and
life and its pandemonium of sound foretold the far-off heaving of some
vast tidal wave, gathering its unearthly power as it swelled.

Coombe talking to his close friend in her few quiet hours at Eaton
Square, found a support in the very atmosphere surrounding her.

"The world at war creates a prehistoric uproar," he said. "The earth
called out of chaos to take form may have produced some such tempestuous
crash. But there is a far-off glow--"

"You believe--something--I believe too. But the prehistoric darkness and
uproar are so appalling. One loses hold." The Duchess leaned forward her
voice dropping. "What do you know that I do not?"

"The light usually breaks in the East," Coombe answered.

"It is breaking in the West to-day. It has always been there and it has
been spreading from the first. At any moment it may set the sky aflame."

For as time had gone on the world had beheld the colossal spectacle of a
huge nation in the melting pot. And, as it was as a nation the composite
result of the fusion of all the countries of the earth, the
breath-suspended lookers-on beheld it in effect, passionately
commercial, passionately generous, passionately sordid, passionately
romantic, chivalrous, cautious, limited, bounded. As American wealth and
sympathy poured in where need was most dire, bitterness became silent
through sheer discretion's sake, when for no more honest reason. As the
commercial tendency expressed itself in readiness and efficiency,
sneering condemnation had