"Don’t tell me—not that you ever have—that there ain’t such a thing as Providence!" Thus Franky, after lunch upon the fateful Third of August, from the hearthrug of the drawing room at 00, Cadogan Place. "When," he went on, "just as I’m on the point of sendin’ in my papers to please you—good old England kerwumps into War!" He continued, as Margot shrugged her small shoulders: "All right, best child! Bet you twenty to one in gloves it comes off!—as sure as the Austrian monitors were shellin’ Belgrade, and the British Cabinet were sittin’ on Sunday, and the weekly rags selling like hot cakes, when you and me and the rest of the congregation were slowly oozin’ out of Church. Why, the Kaiser and the Tsar have been at loggerheads since Saturday. German troops are swampin’ Luxembourg, and the next move will be the Invasion of France. There We come in—and the rest of the big European Powers! Like a row of beehives kicked over!—all the swarms mixed and stingin’, and Kittums’ little Franky in the middle of the scrum!" "Why are you so—frightfully keen about it?" Margot’s great dark deer-eyes were vaguely troubled. She got up from her writing-table, a lovely thing in Russian tulip-tree, the shelf of which was graced by a row of mascots: Ti-Ti and the jade tree-frog, Jollikins, Gojo, and half a dozen more. "Best child, I’m not keen!" asserted Franky. "But I’m pattin’ myself on the back—gloatin’ over the knowledge that I’m not a bally Has Been—but a real live soldier—just when I’m likely to be wanted to be one! Switch on?" He added, as Margot shook her head: "My grammar’s a bit off, but I know what I mean if I can’t express it. Here’s a telegraph-kid on a red spider. Two to one in cough-drops that yellow screed’s for me! Callin’ me to Headquarters just as I’d got into my civvy rags to spend the afternoon with my wife!" The prophecy proved correct. Franky vanished upstairs to peel, plunge into his Guards’ uniform, and whirl away, borne by a taxi, into the dim conjectural regions known as Headquarters.