Schwartzmann surrendered them and the magistrate read them through. First he read the pitiably short, pitiably direct farewell lines the suicide had written to her half-sister before she turned on the gas, and then he read the briefly regretful letter of set terms of condolence, which a clerk in a consular office had in duty bound transcribed. Having read them through, this magistrate, who had read in the newspapers of Liège and Louvain, of Mons and Charlevois, of Ypres and Rheims, of the Masurien Lakes and Poland and Eastern Prussia and Western Flanders and Northern France; who had read also the casualty reports emanating at frequent intervals from half a dozen war offices, reading the one as matters of news and the other, until now, as lists of steadily mounting figures--he raised his head and in his heart he silently cursed war and all its fruits. And next day he went and joined a league for national preparedness. "Schwartzmann," he said as he laid the papers on his desk, "I guess probably your prisoner was telling the whole truth. She did have a brother and he is dead. He was a French soldier and he died about a month or six weeks ago--on the Field of Honour, the letter says. And this note that the girl left, I'll tell you what it says. It says that she heard what the doctor said about her--there must have been a doctor in to see her some time this evening--and that she knows she can never get well, and that they are about out of money, and that she is afraid Marie--Marie is the sister who's in yonder now, I suppose--will do something desperate to get money, so rather than be a burden on her sister she is going to commit a mortal sin. So she asks God to forgive her and let her be with her brother Paul--he's the dead brother, no doubt--when she has paid for her sin. And that is all she says except good-bye." He paused a moment, clearing his throat, and when he went on he spoke aloud, but it was to himself that he spoke rather than to the detective: "Field of Honour? Not one but two out of that family dead on the Field of Honour, by my way of thinking. Yes, and though it's a new name for it, I guess you might call Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue a Field of Honour, too, and not be so very far wrong for this once. What a hellish thing it all is!" "How's that, sir?" asked Schwartzmann. "I didn't quite get you." He had taken the two papers back in his own hands and was shuffling them absently. "Nothing," said the magistrate. And then almost harshly: "Well, what do you want me to do about the woman in the pen yonder?" "Well, sir," said the other slowly, "I was thinkin' that probably you wouldn't care to tell her what's just come off in the flat--at least not in court. And I know I don't want to have to tell her. I thought maybe if you could stretch the rules so's I could get her out of here without havin' to make a regular charge against her and without me havin' to arraign her in the regular way----"