, through which one caught a
glimpse of the park. A great stillness seemed to be around them.

The sale and purchase of the _Evening Gazette_ had been completed a few
days before. Greyson had been offered the alternative of gradually and
gracefully changing his opinions, or getting out; and had, of course,
chosen dismissal. He was taking a holiday, as Mary explained with a
short laugh.

"He had some shares in it himself, hadn't he?" Joan asked.

"Oh, just enough to be of no use," Mary answered. "Carleton was rather
decent, so far as that part of it was concerned, and insisted on paying
him a fair price. The market value would have been much less; and he
wanted to be out of it."

Joan remained silent. It made her mad, that a man could be suddenly
robbed of fifteen years' labour: the weapon that his heart and brain had
made keen wrested from his hand by a legal process, and turned against
the very principles for which all his life he had been fighting.

"I'm almost more sorry for myself than for him," said Mary, making a
whimsical grimace. "He will start something else, so soon as he's got
over his first soreness; but I'm too old to dream of another child."

He came in a little later and, seating himself between them, filled and
lighted his pipe. Looking back, Joan remembered that curiously none of
them had spoken. Mary had turned at the sound of his key in the door.
She seemed to be watching him intently; but it was too dark to notice her
expression. He pulled at his pipe till it was well alight and then
removed it.

"It's war," he said.

The words made no immediate impression upon Joan. There had been
rumours, threatenings and alarms, newspaper talk. But so there had been
before. It would come one day: the world war that one felt was gathering
in the air; that would burst like a second deluge on the nations. But it
would not be in our time: it was too big. A way out would be found.

"Is there no hope?" asked Mary.

"Yes," he answered. "The hope that a miracle may happen. The Navy's got
its orders."

And suddenly--as years before in a Paris music hall--there leapt to life
within Joan's brain a little impish creature that took possession of her.
She hoped the miracle would not happen. The little impish creature
within her brain was marching up and down beating a drum. She wished he
would stop a minute. Someone was trying to talk to her, telling her she
ought to be tremendously shocked and