d
if we were really _something_," they added.

But after their letter had been gone only a few days they saw in the
list of casualties in _The Times_ that Captain John Desmond had been
killed.

And then one day the real solution was revealed, and it was revealed to
Uncle Arthur as he sat in his library on a wet Sunday morning
considering his troubles in detail.

Like most great ideas it sprang full-fledged into being,--obvious,
unquestionable, splendidly simple,--out of a trifle. For, chancing to
raise his heavy and disgusted eyes to the bookshelves in front of him,
they rested on one particular book, and on the back of this book stood
out in big gilt letters the word

AMERICA

There were other words on its back, but this one alone stood out, and it
had all the effect of a revelation.

There. That was it. Of course. That was the way out. Why the devil
hadn't Alice thought of _that_? He knew some Americans; he didn't like
them, but he knew them; and he would write to them, or Alice would write
to them, and tell them the twins were coming. He would give the twins
L200,--damn it, nobody could say that wasn't handsome, especially in
war-time, and for a couple of girls who had no earthly sort of claim on
him, whatever Alice might choose to think they had on her. Yet it was
such a confounded mixed-up situation that he wasn't at all sure he
wouldn't come under the Defence of the Realm Act, by giving them money,
as aiding the enemy. Well, he would risk that. He would risk anything to
be rid of them. Ship 'em off, that was the thing to do. They would fall
on their feet right enough over there. America still swallowed Germans
without making a face.

Uncle Arthur reflected for a moment with extreme disgust on the
insensibility of the American palate. "Lost their chance, that's what
_they've_ done," he said to himself--for this was 1916, and America had
not yet made her magnificent entry into the war--as he had already said
to himself a hundred times. "Lost their chance of coming in on the side
of civilization, and helping sweep the world up tidy of barbarism.
Shoulder to shoulder with us, that's where _they_ ought to have been.
English-speaking races--duty to the world--" He then damned the
Americans; but was suddenly interrupted by perceiving that if they had
been shoulder to shoulder with him and England he wouldn't have been
able to send them his wife's German nieces to take care of. There was,
he conceded, that a