e days. It was this personage
with whom I had gone out to dinner, and to whom I dared make that sudden
speech: "You have been my hero, General Cochrane, since I was ten years
old."

He slued about with the menacing, shrapnel look, and it seemed that
there might be an explosion of sharp-pointed small bullets over the
dinner-table.

"Don't!" I begged. The sun came out; the artillery attack was over; he
looked at me with boyish shyness.

"D'you know, when people say things like that I feel as if I were
stealing," he told me confidentially. "Anybody else could have done all
I did. In fact, it wasn't I at all," he finished.

"Not you? Who then? Weren't you the boy Donald Cochrane?"

"Yes," he said, and stopped as if he were considering it. "Yes," he said
quietly in the clean-cut, terse English manner of speaking, "I suppose I
was the boy Donald Cochrane." He gazed across the white lilacs and pink
roses on the table as if dreaming a bit. Then he turned with a long
breath. "My child," he said, "there is something about you which gives
me back my youth, and--the freshness of a great experience. I thank
you."

I gazed into those compelling eyes, gasping like a fish with too much
oxygen, I felt myself, Virginia Fox, meshed in the fringes of historic
days, stirred by the rushing mighty wind of that Great Experience. I was
awestruck into silence. Just then Milly got up, and eight women flocked
into the library.

I was good for nothing there, simply good for nothing at all. I tried to
talk to the nice, sensible English women, and I could not. I knew Milly
was displeased with me for not keeping up my end, but I was sodden with
thrills. I had sat through a dinner next to General Cochrane, the Donald
Cochrane who was the most dramatic figure of the world war of sixty
years ago. It has always moved me to meet persons who even existed at
that time. I look at them and think what intense living it must have
meant to pick up a paper and read--as the news of the day, mind
you--that Germany had entered Belgium, that King Albert was fighting in
the trenches, that Von Kluck was within seventeen miles of Paris, that
Von Kluck was retreating--think of the rapture of that--Paris
saved!--that the Germans had taken Antwerp; that the _Lusitania_ was
sunk; that Kitchener was drowned at sea! I wonder if the people who
lived and went about their business in America in those days realized
that they were having a stage-box for the greatest drama