roceed. I brace myself against an explosion of indignation!"

"It is the duty of a teacher of peace to use all her influence with the
people she knows," she went on. "So I am going to ask you not to let
your country ever go to war against mine while you are chief of staff."

"Mine against yours?" he equivocated. "Why, you live almost within
gunshot of the line! Your people have as much Gray as Brown blood in
their veins, _Your_ country! _My_ country! Isn't that patriotism?"

"Patriotism, but not martial patriotism," she corrected him. "My thought
is to stop war for both countries as war, regardless of sides. Promise
me that you will not permit it!"

"I not permit it!" He smiled with the kindly patronage of a great man
who sees a charming woman floundering in an attempt at logic. "It is for
the premier to say. I merely make the machine ready. The government says
the word that makes it move. I able to stop war! Come, come!"

"But you can--yes, you can with a word!" she declared positively.

"How?" he asked, amazed. "How?" he repeated blandly.

Was she teasing him? he wondered. What new resources of confusion had
ten years and a tour around the world developed in her? Was it possible
that the Whole idea of the teachers of peace was an invention to make
conversation at his expense? If so, she carried it off with a sincerity
that suggested other depths yet unsounded.

"Very easily," she answered. "You can tell the premier that you cannot
win. Tell him that you will break your army to pieces against the
Browns' fortifications!"

He gasped. Then an inner voice prompted him that the cue was comedy.

"Excellent fooling--excellent!" he said with a laugh. "Tell the premier
that I should lose when I have five million men to their three million!
What a harlequin chief of staff I should be! Excellent fooling! You
almost had me!"

Again he laughed, though in the fashion of one who had hardly unbent his
spine, while he was wishing for the old days when he might take tea with
her one or two afternoons a week. It would be a fine tonic after his
isolation at the apex of the pyramid surveying the deference of the
lower levels. Then he saw that her eyes, shimmering with wonder, grew
dull and her lips parted in a rigid, pale line as if she were hurt.

"You think I am joking?" she asked.

"Why, yes!"

"But I am not! No, no, not about such a ghastly subject as a war
to-day!" She was leaning toward him, hands on knee and eyes bur