Chapter 1 - Page 2

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 saying? I've been like a chap in a dream. I'm not awake
yet."

All that he had said to the girl was a simple fact. He had exaggerated
nothing. If, in what now seemed that long-ago past, he had not been a
sturdy, normal little lad surrounded by love and friendliness, with his
days full of healthy play and pleasure, the child tragedy of their being
torn apart might have left ugly marks upon his mind, and lurked there, a
morbid memory. And though, in time, rebellion and suffering had died
away, he had never really forgotten. Even to the cricket-playing,
larking boy at Eton there had now and then returned, with queer
suddenness, recollections which gave him odd moments of resurrected
misery. They passed away, but at long intervals they came back and
always with absolute reality. At Oxford the intervals had been longer
but a certain picture was one whose haunting never lost its clearness.
It was a vision of a colour-warm child kneeling on the grass, her eyes
uplifted, expressing only a lonely patience, and he could actually hear
her humble little voice as she said:

"I--I haven't anything." And it always roused him to rage.

Then there was the piteous break in her voice when she hid her eyes with
her arm and said of her beast of a mother:

"She--doesn't _like_ me!"

"Damn! Damn!" he used to say every time the thing came back. "Oh!