e world upside down would have prevented him writing;
but the world _had_ turned upside down. It was not a board Pike's men
had swung around in that appalling moment when he had watched them
appear on the balcony. It was the accustomed and imponderable world,
awfully unbalanced. Nona would understand. Nona always understood
everything. He wondered how she had maintained this terrific day. He was
assured that he knew. She would have felt just as he had felt. He
thought, with a most passionate longing for her, that he would have
given anything to have been able to turn to her when he had exclaimed,
"My God, war", and to have caught her hands and looked into her
beautiful face. To-morrow he would send the letter. To-morrow? Why, yes,
to-day, like all to-days in the removed and placid light of all
to-morrows, would be shown needlessly hectic. Ten to one something would
have happened in the night to make to-day look foolish. If nothing had
happened, if it still was war, it could only be a swiftly over business,
a rapid and general recognition of the impossibility of war in modern
conditions.

Disturbingly upon these thoughts appeared the face of Otway, the little
beads of perspiration about his nose.

His consciousness stumbled away into the mazy woods of sleep, and
turned, and all night sought to return, and stumbled sometimes to its
knees among the drowsy snares, and saw strange mirages of the round
world horrifically tilted with "War" upon its face, of Nona held away
and not approachable, of intense light and of suffocating darkness; and
rousing and struggling away from these, and stumbling yet, rarely
succumbing.

III

When he went down into Tidborough in the morning it was to know at once
that this to-morrow gave no lie to its precedent day. It intensified it.
The previous day foreshadowed war. The new day presented it.

The papers, as it happened, did not arrive before he left, and Mabel had
more to say of her annoyance with the insufferable Jones than of what
his withheld wares might contain. Her attitude towards the international
position was--up to this point of its development--precisely this: she
had been following the crisis day by day with appreciation of its
sensational headlines while these were in the paper before her, but
without further interest when the paper was read. She folded up the
thrones, the chancelleries, the councils, the armies and the peoples and
put them away in the brass newspaper rac