These young men, so well-groomed, so urbane, so charming even, all of them no doubt generously equipped to love and marry and protect with their lives the girl of their choice, were they too but the soldiers of an everlasting battlefield, often at bay and desperate in the trenches? No matter how good their work, how great their "killing," the struggle must be renewed daily to maintain their own footing, to advance, or at least to uphold, the power of their little autocracy. To them journalism was the most important thing in the world, and mere persons like herself, suddenly lifted from obscurity to the brassy peaks of notoriety were so much material for first page columns of the newspapers they served with all the loyalty of those deluded soldiers on the European battlefields. She understood them with an abrupt and complete clarity, but she hated them. They might like and even admire her, but they would show her no mercy if they discovered that she had been in the yard that night. She felt as if a pack of wolves were at her heels. But finally her brow relaxed. She shrugged her shoulders and began to unbutton the dense black gown that had expressed the mood the world demands of a four-days' widow. Let them suspect, divine what they chose. Not a soul on earth but Anna Steuer knew that she had been out that night after her return home. Even had those lynx-eyed young men sat on the box hedge they could not have seen her, for the avenue was well lighted, and the grove, the entire yard in fact, had been as black as a mine. Even the person skulking among those trees could not have guessed who she was. For a moment she had been tempted to tell them a little; that she had looked out and seen a moving shadow in the grove. But she had remembered in time that they would ask why she had reserved this testimony at the coroner's inquest. Her role was to know nothing. Indubitably the shot had been fired from the trees; nobody questioned that; why involve herself? They would discharge still another set of questions at her, among others why she had not telephoned for the police. As she hung up her gown she recognised the heavy footfalls of her maid of all work, and when Frieda knocked, bade her enter, employing those cool impersonal tones so resented by the European servant after a brief sojourn on the dedicated American soil.