quietly in a country at war, suffering for nothing,
very little inconvenienced, even by the departure of all the men. The
field work seems to be going on just the same. Every one seems calm.
It is all most unexpected and strange to me."

"I don't see it that way at all," said the Journalist. "I feel as if I
were sitting on a volcano, knowing it was going to erupt, but not
knowing at what moment."

"That I understand," said the Divorcee, "but that is not exactly what
I mean. I meant that, in spite of _that_ feeling which every one
between here and Paris must have, I see no outward signs of it."

"They are all about us just the same," remarked the Doctor, "whether
you see them or not. Did it ever happen to you to be walking in some
quiet city street, near midnight, when all the houses were closed, and
only here and there a street lamp gleamed, and here and there a ray of
light filtered through the shuttered window of some silent house, and
to suddenly remember that inside all these dark walls the tragedies of
life were going on, and that, if a sudden wave of a magician's wand
were to wipe away the walls, how horrified, or how amused one would
be?"

"Well," said the Lawyer, "I have had that idea many times, but it has
come to me more often in some hotel in the mountains of Switzerland. I
remember one night sitting on the terrace at Murren, with the Jungfrau
rising in bridal whiteness above the black sides of the
Schwarze-Monch, and the moon shining so brightly over the slopes, that
I could count any number of isolated little chalets perched on the
ledges, and I never had the feeling so strongly of life going on with
all its joys and griefs and crimes, invisible, but oppressive."

"I am afraid," said the Doctor, "that there is enough of it going on
right here--if we only knew it. I had an example this afternoon. I was
walking through the village, when an old woman called to me, and asked
if I were the doctor from the old Grange. I said I was, and she begged
me to come in and see her daughter-in-law. She was very ill, and the
local doctor is gone. I found a young, very pretty girl, with a tiny
baby, in as bad a state of hysteria as I ever saw. But that is not the
story. That I heard by degrees. It seems the father-in-law, a veteran
of 1870, now old, and nearly helpless, is of good family, but married,
in his middle age, a woman of the country. They had one son who was
sent away to school, and became a civil engineer. H