FATE DISPOSES

Now and then the accustomed world turns a somersault; one day it faces
you with familiar features, the next it wears a quite unrecognizable
countenance. The experience is, of course, nothing new, though it is
to be doubted whether it was ever staged so dramatically and on so
vast a scale as during the past four years. And no one to whom it
happens is ever the same afterward.

Elliott Cameron was not a refugee. She did not trudge Flemish roads
with the pitiful salvage of her fortunes on her back, nor was she
turned out of a cottage in Poland with only a sackful of her household
treasures. Nevertheless, American girl though she was, she had to be
evacuated from her house of life, the house she had been building
through sixteen petted, autocratic years. This is the story of that
evacuation.

It was made, for all the world, like any Pole's or Serbian's or
Belgian's; material valuables she let pass with glorious carelessness,
as they left the silver spoons in order to salvage some sentimental
trifle like a baby-shoe or old love-letters. Elliott took the closing
of her home as she had taken the disposal of the big car, cheerfully
enough, but she could not leave behind some absurd little tricks of
thought that she had always indulged in. She was as strange to the
road as any Picardy peasant and as bewildered, with--shall I say
it?--considerably less pluck and spirit than some of them, when the
landmarks she had lived by were swept away. But they, you see, had a
dim notion of what was happening to them. Elliott had none. She didn't
even know that she was being evacuated. She knew only that ways which
had always worked before had mysteriously ceased working, that
prejudices and preoccupations and habits of mind and action, which she
had spent her life in accumulating, she must now say good-by to, and
that the war, instead of being across the sea, a thing one's friends
and cousins sailed away to, had unaccountably got right into America
itself and was interfering to an unreasonable extent in affairs that
were none of its business.

Father came home one night from a week's absence and said, as he
unfolded his napkin, "Well, chicken, I'm going to France."

They were alone at dinner. Miss Reynolds, the housekeeper, was dining
out with friends, as she sometimes did; nights that, though they both
liked Miss Reynolds, father and daughter checked with a red mark.

"To France?" A little thrill pricked the girl's