him he'd be an Army aviator all
right, in training for using his own bomb-dropper----

Here his young cousin dropped her soup-spoon with a clatter.

"What?" cried Miss Million sharply. "You? If there is any war, shall you
start fighting the Germans?"

"I should say so!" smiled Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. "Why, yes!"

"But you're American! Why ever on earth should you fight?" demanded Miss
Million rather shrilly. "Nothing to do with you! You aren't English; you
aren't Belgium! You belong to a--what's it?--a neutral nation!"

"I guess I'm not going to let that stand in my way any," said Mr. Hiram
P. Jessop, "if there's a chance of getting in at those hounds!"

And I saw a curious change come over my mistress's small, bonny face as
she regarded this man who--under no obligation to fight--felt he could
not merely look on at a struggle between Right and Might.

It was not the sentimental, girlish adoration that she had turned upon
her first fancy, the Honourable Jim.

It was the look of a real woman upon the man who pleases her.

This was not the only quick change which the war made.

For instance, who would have thought that those German Jews, the
Rattenheimers, would ever have had to be interned in a camp in the
middle of England, away from all their friends and all their
jewel-collecting pursuits?

And who would have thought that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop--I beg his pardon! I
mean Flight-Lieutenant H. P. Jessop, of the Royal Flying Corps, was
responsible for the prompt and uncompromising manner in which that alien
couple were "dropped upon" by the authorities. Well! I should like to
hope that their imprisonment was at least half as uncomfortable as that
night which my mistress and I passed--thanks to them--at Vine Street
police-station! But no, I suppose that's too much to expect.

Then there's the change that has been brought about by the war in my
young mistress herself.

At a time when all uniform is glorious, she herself has gone back to
uniform, to her old, cast-aside livery of the print frock, the small
white cap, the apron of domestic service!

I gasped when I first heard what she intended to take up, namely, the
position of "ward-maid" in a big London house that has been turned into
a hospital for wounded officers.

"I must do something for them," she told me. "I feel I must!"

"Well, but why this particular thing?" I demurred. "If you wanted to you
could take up nursing----"

"Nursin', nothing!" she retor