The sound of horse’s hoofs clattering down the long street rang nearer and nearer, then suddenly ceased. I sprang to the window. Below Demian was dismounting. “What is the matter, Demian? Nothing can have happened to your mother?” He did not listen to my words. He was very pale, and perspiration ran down both sides of his forehead over his cheeks. His horse was flecked with foam. He tied the reins to the garden fence, then he took my arm and walked with me down the street. “Have you already heard the news?” I had heard nothing. Demian pressed my arm and turned his face to me, with a dark, compassionate, singular look. “Yes, old man, now we’re in for it. You know of the strained relations with Russia----” “What? Is it war? I had never believed it.” He spoke in an undertone, although no one was near. “It is not yet declared. But it’s war. Rely on it. I haven’t worried you lately, but I have seen three new omens since. It will be no foundering of the world, no earthquake, no revolution. It’s war. You will see how that strikes everybody. It will be a joy to people; everyone already rejoices that hostilities are about to commence. So insipid has life become for them. But you will see now, Sinclair, that is only the beginning. This will perhaps be a great war, a very great war. The new dispensation commences and for those who adhere to the old, the new will be terrible. What will you do?” I was perplexed, everything sounded so strange and improbable. “I don’t know--and you?” He shrugged his shoulders. “As soon as mobilization orders are out, I join up. I am a lieutenant.” “You? I had no idea of that.” “Yes. It was one of my adaptations. You know, I have never wanted to appear out of the ordinary, and have rather done too much, in order to be correct, to do the right thing. In eight days, I think, I shall be already in the field.” “For God’s sake!” “Look here, old fellow, you mustn’t take things so sentimentally. At bottom it certainly won’t give me pleasure to order machine gunfire to be turned on living creatures, but that is a secondary matter. Now each one of us will be seized by the great wheel of fate. You as well. You will certainly be called up.” “And your mother, Demian?” Then for the first time I recollected what I was doing a quarter of an hour before. How the world had changed! I had summoned together all my force in order to conjure up the sweetest picture, and now fate had suddenly put on a new, horrible mask. “My mother? We need have no cares for her safety. She is safe, safer than anyone else in the world to-day. You love her so very much?” “You knew it, Demian?” He laughed brightly and without any embarrassment. “You child! Naturally I knew it. No one has yet called my mother Mother Eve without loving her. By the way, how was that? You have called to either her or myself to-day, haven’t you?” “Yes, I called--I called to Mother Eve.”