ucifixes. A
long way off, through the opening at the end of the Forest, were the
little lights of Mitten Island.

"Do you know," said Richard--and this is unfortunately the sort of thing
that young men do say at silent and enchanted moments--"that if all the
magic in this Forest were collected together and compressed into a
liquid form, it would be enough to stop the War in one moment?"

"My hat!" said Sarah Brown. "In one moment?"

"In one moment."

"My hat!" said Sarah Brown.

"The powers of magic haven't been anything like thoroughly estimated
even yet," said Richard.

"I suppose the War was made by black magic," suggested Sarah Brown,
trying to talk intelligently and to be faithful to her own thoughts at
the same time.

"Good Lord, no," replied Richard. "The worst of this war is that it has
nothing whatever to do with magic of any sort. It was made and is
supported by men who had forgotten magic, it is the result of the coming
to an end of a spell. Haven't you noticed that a spell came to an end at
the beginning of the last century? Why, doesn't almost every one see
something lacking about the Victorian age?"

"Something certainly died with Keats and Shelley," sighed Sarah Brown.

"Oh well," said Richard, "I don't know about books. I can't read, you
know. But obviously what was wrong with the last century was just that
it didn't believe in fairies."

"Does this century believe in fairies? If the spell came to an end, how
is it that we are so magic now?"

"This century knows that it doesn't know everything," said Richard. "And
as for spells--we have started a new spell. That's the curious part of
this War. So gross and so impossible and so unmagic was its cause, that
magic, which had been virtually dead, rose again to meet it. The worse a
world grows, the greater will magic grow to save it. Magic only dies in
a tepid world. I think there is now more magic in the world than ever
before. The soil of France is alive with it, and as for Belgium--when
Belgium gets back home at last she will find her desecrated house
enchanted.... And the same applies to all the thresholds in the world
which fighting-men have crossed and will never cross again, except in
the dreams of their friends. That sort of austere and secret magic, like
a word known by all and spoken by none, is pretty nearly all that is
left to keep the world alive now...."

Richard seemed to be becoming less and less of a man and more and more
of a