He slued about with the menacing, shrapnel look, and it seemed that there might be an explosion of sharp-pointed small bullets over the dinner-table. "Don't!" I begged. The sun came out; the artillery attack was over; he looked at me with boyish shyness. "D'you know, when people say things like that I feel as if I were stealing," he told me confidentially. "Anybody else could have done all I did. In fact, it wasn't I at all," he finished. "Not you? Who then? Weren't you the boy Donald Cochrane?" "Yes," he said, and stopped as if he were considering it. "Yes," he said quietly in the clean-cut, terse English manner of speaking, "I suppose I was the boy Donald Cochrane." He gazed across the white lilacs and pink roses on the table as if dreaming a bit. Then he turned with a long breath. "My child," he said, "there is something about you which gives me back my youth, and--the freshness of a great experience. I thank you." I gazed into those compelling eyes, gasping like a fish with too much oxygen, I felt myself, Virginia Fox, meshed in the fringes of historic days, stirred by the rushing mighty wind of that Great Experience. I was awestruck into silence. Just then Milly got up, and eight women flocked into the library. I was good for nothing there, simply good for nothing at all. I tried to talk to the nice, sensible English women, and I could not. I knew Milly was displeased with me for not keeping up my end, but I was sodden with thrills. I had sat through a dinner next to General Cochrane, the Donald Cochrane who was the most dramatic figure of the world war of sixty years ago. It has always moved me to meet persons who even existed at that time. I look at them and think what intense living it must have meant to pick up a paper and read--as the news of the day, mind you--that Germany had entered Belgium, that King Albert was fighting in the trenches, that Von Kluck was within seventeen miles of Paris, that Von Kluck was retreating--think of the rapture of that--Paris saved!--that the Germans had taken Antwerp; that the _Lusitania_ was sunk; that Kitchener was drowned at sea! I wonder if the people who lived and went about their business in America in those days realized that they were having a stage-box for the greatest drama of history? I wonder. Terror and heroism and cruelty find self-sacrifice on a scale which had never been dreamed, which will never, God grant, need to be dreamed on this poor little racked planet again. Of course, there are plenty of those people alive yet, and I've talked to many and they remember it, all of them remember well, even those who were quite small. And it has stirred me simply to look into the eyes of such an one and consider that those eyes read such things as morning news. The great war has had a hold on me since I first heard of it, and I distinctly remember the day, from my father, at the age of seven.