aid, "now I'm hearing a bit more about it. I was
thinking just now what a dramatic thing it would be if it lasted--of
course it can't--but if it lasted till next June and the decisive
battle was fought in June, 1915, just a hundred years after Waterloo.
That would be dramatic, eh?"

They all laughed, and Sabre, realising the preposterousness of such a
notion, laughed with them. Twyning said, "Next June! Imagine it! At the
very outside it will be well over by Christmas."

And they all agreed, "Oh, rather!"

V

It was all immensely reassuring, and Sabre gathered up his bundle of
papers and went into his room, feeling on the whole rather pleasurably
excited than otherwise. But as he read, column after column and paper
after paper, measures that had been taken by the Government, orders to
Army and Naval reservists, the impending call for men, the scenes in the
streets of London, and with these the deeply grave tone of the leading
articles, the tremendous statistics and the huge foreshadowing of
certain of the military correspondents, the breathless news already from
the seats of war,--as his mind thus received there returned to it its
earlier sense of enormous oppression and tremendous conjecture. War....
England.... The first sentence of his history, now greatly advanced,
came tremendously into his mind: "This England you live in is
_yours_...." And now at war--challenged--threatened--

It surged enormously within him. He got up. He must go out into the
streets and see what was happening.

The day wore on. He felt extraordinarily shy and self-conscious about
the performance of a matter that had entered his mind with that surging
uplift of his feelings. It was four o'clock in the afternoon before he
took himself to it and then, leaving its place, he unexpectedly
encountered Mabel. She was just going into the station. She had come in,
as she had proposed, and she told him what she had said to Jones and
what Jones had said to her. "Abominably rude man."

Then she asked him, "Was that Doctor Anderson's gate you came out of
just now?"

"Yes."

"Whatever had you been to see him about?"

He flushed. He never could invent an excuse when he wanted one. "I'd
been asking him to have a look at me."

"Whatever for?"

"Oh, nothing particular."

"You couldn't have been to see him for nothing."

"Well, practically nothing. You remember when I increased my life
insurance some time ago they said my heart was a bit grogg