thoroughly enjoying life as you, Nick--"

Colcord stared at her a moment.

"Well, I do," he replied at length. "But I want to say this right here:
if some person or presence, some supernatural being, say, should come
here to-night, at this table, and tell me that by giving up my life
right now I would, through that act, bring an end to--"

"Nick!" Evelyn Colcord's voice was poignantly sharp.

"If through that little sacrifice the blood glut in Europe would end,
I'd do it cheerfully, joyfully, in a minute."

Simec was gazing at the speaker with half-closed eyes; the others, in
thrall of his words, were staring at the table or at one another.

"What a thought!" Mrs. Allison glanced at him curiously. "Coming from
you, of all men, Nick!"

"I wonder if I could say that?" Jerry Dane sank down in his chair, put
his hands in his pockets, and gazed sombrely up at the ceiling. "By
George! I wish I could--but I can't."

Bates shifted uneasily. He shrugged.

"It's too hypothetical. And yet--of course it's absurd--yet if the
thing _could_ happen, I think I'd stick with Colcord."

"In other words"--Simec's voice now had a sibilant hiss--"if you could
end war through your death you'd be willing to die--now, or at any
specified time?"

"If you're talking to me," said Colcord, "I'm on record. Those who know
me well know I don't have to say a thing twice."

"I was talking to Mr. Bates," replied the inventor. "He seemed
doubtful."

"Well, I'm not now," retorted the writer sharply. "I'm with Nick
absolutely."

Doctor Allison was shaking his head.

"Theoretically, I would make the same assertion," he confessed, "but I
wish to be honest; I don't know whether I could do it or not."

"Neither do I," said Dane. "A certainty like that and taking a chance on
the battlefield are two different things. What do you say, Latham;
you've been through the mill?"

"Well, you know," shrugged the soldier, "I fancy I'm a bit hardened. I'd
like to see the thing through now. We've gone so far, don't you know."

There was a momentary silence broken only by the soft movements of the
butler and footman. One of the windows rattled in a gust of wind and
rain. Under the flickering candle-lights the company seemed to draw
to-gether in a fellowship that was not the bond of gustatory
cheer--which Evelyn could so infallibly establish at her table--but a
communion of sympathetic feeling as of one drawing to another in the
common thrall of subdued