The old Professor of Botany stood looking at this mysterious typewritten letter, addressed to him, with the rest of his large mail, at the hotel in Western France where he was staying in the fourth autumn of the War with his young niece and secretary. He smiled as he came to the last words. "Had he ever wondered!" How many nights of his youth had been wasted in stormily "wondering----?" Strangers who write to celebrities do stumble on intimate matters sometimes. He read on: "_Why should one girl set her affections upon the man who of all others will make her the worst possible husband? All her friends foresee, and warn her. She herself realizes it vaguely. But to her own destruction she loves him. What has caused this catastrophe? Some small and secret Force; one microbe can achieve a pestilence._" "Yes, indeed," murmured Professor Howel-Jones, nodding his massive old white head. He had been on the point of tossing the letter into the waste-paper basket, but something made him read on. "_Another young man, why must he desire the one pretty woman who can never give him happiness? She is 'pure as ice, chaste as snow' ... dull as ditch-water; he, full of fire and dreams. He swears he'll teach her to respond to Passion; marries her. Another tragedy!_" How like himself again, the Professor mused, going back to the days when he had worn his Rugby International cap with more pride than he now wore his foreign degrees. That memory set him staring out of the big balconied window of his room, over the wide French lagoon, past the barrier of sandhills with their pointing phare, to where, miles away, the irregular white line of the Atlantic rollers crashed and spouted on the reefs. They had been crashing out those thunderous questions to the sands on his football days, they would be tossing their appeals to the sky long after his learning and his Nobel Prize were forgotten. Why, then, should an anonymous correspondent remind him of old unrest? For all that, he went on reading: "_Each of us knows a list of these stories. How avert them? By seeking out and planting only in the right soil the root of good or evil, the Love-germ. All through the ages Man has recognized its existence; the ancients with their philtres and amulets. Shakespeare embodies it in an herb. We moderns accept it as an enigma; have you never heard it said of a woman_, 'She is not actually pretty, but she has the Disturbing Charm, whatever it is'?"