face, and they are all girt for battle."

"Yes, I have proof," she answered, "indirect but damning enough.
This man has sometimes forwarded and collected for me letters from
connections of mine in Germany. He handed me one to-night from a distant
cousin. You know him by name General Geroldberg. The first two pages are
personal. Read what he says towards the end," she added, passing it on
to Julian.

Julian turned up the lamp and read the few lines to which she pointed:

By the bye, dear cousin, if you should receive a shock within the next
few days by hearing that our three great men have agreed to an absurd
peace, do not worry. Their signatures have been obtained for some
document which we do not regard seriously, and it is their intention to
repudiate them as soon as a certain much-looked for event takes place.
When the peace comes, believe me, it will be a glorious one for us. What
we have won by the sword we shall hold, and what has been wrested from
us by cunning and treachery, we shall regain.

"That man," Catherine declared, "is one of the Kaiser's intimates. He is
one of the twelve iron men of Germany. Now I will tell you the name
of the man with whom I, have spent the evening. It is Baron Hellman.
Believe me, he knows, and he has told me the truth. He has had this
letter by him for a fortnight, as he told me frankly that he thought it
too compromising to hand over. To-night he changed his mind."

Julian stood speechless for a moment, his fists clenched, his eyes
ablaze.

Catherine threw herself into his easy-chair and loosened her coat.

"Oh, I am tired!" she moaned. "Give me some water, please, or some
wine."

He found some hock in the sideboard, and after she had drunk it they sat
for some few minutes in agitated silence. The street sounds outside
had died away. Julian's was the topmost flat in the block, and their
isolation was complete. He suddenly realised the position.

"Perhaps," he suggested, with an almost ludicrous return to the
commonplace, "the first thing to be done is for me to dress."

She looked at him as though she had noticed his dishabille for the first
time. For a moment their feet seemed to be on the earth again.

"I suppose I seem to you crazy to come to you at such an hour," she
said. "One doesn't think of those things, somehow."

"You are quite right," he agreed. "They are unimportant."

Then suddenly the sense of the silence, of their solitude, of their
strange, uncertai