“In love and truth together there’s a power which, if we have the patience to wait for its working out, will solve all difficulties and meet all needs.” I had tried that—love and truth together!—and at the result I could only laugh. My immediate fear was lest Mrs. Grace and the Grahams would be on the veranda, vaguely expecting to offer me their congratulations. When half-way up the steps I heard voices and knew that they were there. So be it! I had faced worse things in my life; and now I could face that. But as I advanced up the lawn I saw them moving about and talking with animation. As soon as Mrs. Grace caught sight of me she hurried down the steps, meeting me as I passed among the flower-beds. She held a newspaper marked Extra in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten that I had love-affairs. “Have you seen this? Colt, the chauffeur, was at the station and brought it back. It’s just come down from New York.” Glad of anything that would distract attention from myself, I took the paper in my hand and pretended to be reading it. All I got was the vague information that some one had been assassinated—some man and his morganatic wife. What did it matter to me? What did it matter to any one? Of all that was printed there, only five syllables took possession of my memory—and that because they were meaningless, “Gavrilo Prinzip!” I was repeating them to myself as I handed the paper back, and we exchanged comments of which I have no recollection. More comments were passed with the Grahams, and then, blindly, drunkenly, I made my way to my room. There I found nothing to do less classic than to sit at the open window, to look over at the red-and-yellow house on the opposite hill. It was my intention to think the matter out, but my brain seemed to have stopped working. Nothing came to me but those barbaric sounds, that kept repeating themselves with a kind of hiss: “Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!” From my stupefied scanning of the paper I hadn’t grasped the fact that a name utterly unknown that morning was being flashed round the world at a speed more rapid than that of the earth round the sun. Still less did I suspect that it was to become in its way the most sinister name in history. I kept repeating it only as you repeat senseless things in the minutes before you go to sleep. “Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip! Gavrilo Prinzip!” _CHAPTER XVII_ I came back as Major Melbury, of one of the Canadian regiments. It was in November, 1916, that I was invalided home to Canada, lamed and wearing a disfiguring black patch over what had been my left eye.