edge of foam. And I sought you with a kind
of reluctance as though finding you would bring nearer the black
irrational disaster that hung over us all.

And when I found you at last you were all radiantly happy and healthy,
the prettiest of families, and only your mother was touched with any
gravity deeper than the joy of sunshine and sea. You and Mademoiselle
Potin--in those days her ministrations were just beginning--were busy
constructing a great sea-wall that should really and truly stop the
advancing tide. Rachel Two was a little apart, making with infinite
contentment an endless multitude of conical sand pies with her little
tin pail. Margaret, a pink inarticulate lump, scrabbled in the warm sand
under Jessica's care. Your mother sat and watched you--thoughtfully. And
before any of you knew that I was there my shadow fell across you all.

You accepted my appearance when I ought to have been in Italy with the
unquestioning confidence with which you still take all my comings and
goings. For you, Italy, America, any place is just round the corner. I
was kissed with affection but haste, and you got back to your sand-works
as speedily as possible. I inspected Rachel Two's mounds,--she was
giving them the names of her various aunts and uncles--and patted the
crowing Margaret, who ignored me. Rachel had sprung to her feet and
kissed me and now hovered radiant over me as I caressed you youngsters.
It was all so warm, so real, that for an instant the dark threat that
hung over us all vanished from my skies, to return with the force of a
blow.

"And what has brought you back?" said Rachel. "I had expected a month of
widowhood. What can have brought you back?"

The dancing gladness in her eyes vanished swiftly as she waited for an
answer to her question. She caught the note of tragedy from my face.
"Why have you come back from Italy?" she asked in an altered voice.

"Rachel," I said taking her arm, with a desolating sense of the
futility in my gesture of protection; "let us walk along the beach. I
want to tell you something---- Something rather complicated."

"Is there going to be war, Stephen?" she asked abruptly.

It seemed then that this question which merely concerned the welfare of
a hundred million people or so and pain, destruction and disaster beyond
measure, was the most trivial of digressions.

"No," I said. "I haven't thought about the war."

"But I thought--you were thinking of nothing else."

"This ha