the best blood of
both. Bating Joan of Arc--a woman--France hasn't bred a finer spirit
than Montcalm's since she bred Froissart's men. But to what end?
England will break that great heart of his."

She was talking for talking's sake, only anxious to divert Mrs.
Hake's ears from the conversation her own ears caught, only too
plainly.

Mrs. Hake said, "I prefer to believe Mr. Castres. My brother writes
that every one is quitting New York, and I'm only thankful-if war
must come, over there--that we've taken our house on a three years'
lease only. No one troubles about Portugal, and I must say that I've
never found a city to compare with Lisbon. The suburbs! . . . Why,
this very morning I saw the city itself one pall of smoke.
You'd have thought a main square was burning. Yet up here, in Buenos
Ayres, it might have been midsummer. . . . The children, playing in
the garden, called me out to look at the smoke. _Was_ there a fire?
I must ask Sir Oliver."

Mrs. Hake had raised her voice; but Ruth managed to intercept the
question.

All the while she was thinking, thinking to herself.--"And he, who
can speak thus, once endured shame to shield me! He laughs at things
infinitely crueller. . . . Yet they differ in degree only from what
then stirred him to fight. . . ."

--"Have I then so far worsened him? Is the blame mine?"

--"Or did the curse but delay to work in him?--in him, my love and my
hero? Was it foreordained to come to this, though I would at any
time have given my life to prevent it?"

Again she thought.--"I have been wrong in holding religion to be the
great cause why men are cruel,--as in believing that free-thought
must needs humanise us all. Strange! that I should discover my error
on this very day has showed me men being led by religion to deaths of
torture. . . . Yet an error it must be. For see my lord--hear how he
laughs as cruelly, even, as the _devote_ at his elbow!"

They had loitered some while over dessert, and Ruth's eye sought
Donna Maria's, to signal her before rising and leaving the gentlemen
to their wine. But Donna Maria was running a preoccupied glance
around the table and counting with her fingers. . . . Presently the
glance grew distraught and the silly woman fell back in her chair
with a cry.

"Jesus! We are thirteen!"

"Faith, so we are," said Sir Oliver with an easy laugh, after
counting.

"And I the uninvited one! The calamity must fall on _me_--there is
no oth