in the
stateroom that started the dreaming."

He had wrung our hands one after another, and now he ran out of the
room.

Rulledge said, in appeal to Wanhope: "I don't see how his being the
dreamer invalidates the case, if his dreams affected the others."

"Well," Wanhope answered, thoughtfully, "that depends."

"And what do you think of its being the girl in the stateroom?"

"That would be very interesting."

V

EDITHA

The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm
which has not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot spring
afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the
question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she could
not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still leafless
avenue, making slowly up towards the house, with his head down and his
figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the edge of
the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her will
before she called aloud to him: "George!"

He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence,
before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, "Well?"

"Oh, how united we are!" she exulted, and then she swooped down the
steps to him. "What is it?" she cried.

"It's war," he said, and he pulled her up to him and kissed her.

She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion,
and uttered from deep in her throat. "How glorious!"

"It's war," he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she
did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think
of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship,
which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had
been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise
it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his
abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his
old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed
and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble
seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but
that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that
sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the
miracle was already wrought in him. In the presence of the tremendous
fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gon