The only trouble of late on the Continent had been the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife about a month before. And that seemed to be working itself off in acrimonious snappings and yappings by the Austrian and Servian papers. Austria would in due course undoubtedly claim such guarantees of future good behaviour on the part of her troublesome little neighbour as the circumstances, when fully investigated, should call for. The tone of the note she had sent, calling on Servia no longer to permit the brewing of trouble within her borders, was somewhat brusque no doubt but not unnaturally so. And Servia, weary with her late struggles, would, of course, comply and there the matter would end. It was unthinkable that the general peace should suffer from such a cause when it had survived the great flare-up in the Balkans the year before. Austria would not dare to go too far since she must first consult Germany, and the Kaiser, it was well known, desired nothing better than to maintain the peace which he had kept so resolutely for five-and-twenty years. If it had been that hot-head, the Crown Prince, now---- But fortunately for the world the reins were in cooler hands. Then again the Money Market here showed no more disturbance than was to be expected under such unsettled conditions, and the Bank-rate remained at three per cent. The Berlin and Vienna Bourses were somewhat unsettled. But there were always adventurous spirits abroad ready to take advantage of any little disturbance and reap nefarious harvests. Anyway he could see no adequate connection between any of these things and the sudden stoppage of his deliveries of beet-sugar from Germany and Austria, and the unusual lapsus in correspondence and remittances from both those countries,--which matters were causing him endless worry and anxiety. His brother-in-law, Leroux, in Paris, had hinted at no gathering clouds, as he certainly would have done had any been perceptible. And the sensitive pulse of international affairs on the Bourse there would have perceived them instantly if they had existed. The very fact that M. Poincaré, the President, was away in Russia was proof positive that the sky was clear. The only actual hint of anything at all out of the common was in that last letter from his eldest girl, Lois, who had been studying at the Conservatorium in Leipsic for the last two years. She had written, about a week before,--“What is brewing? There is a spirit of suppressed excitement abroad here, but I cannot learn what it means. They tell me it is the usual preparation for the Autumn manœuvres. It may be so, but all the time I have been here I have never seen anything quite like it. If they were preparing for war I could understand it, but that is of course out of the question, since the Kaiser’s heart is set on peace, as everyone knows.”