With a stab of the old agony, Mary remembered the day she got his letter admitting his relations with Felicity. The unbelievable breakdown of her whole life! His easy, lightly made excuses. He, in whose arms she had lain a hundred times, with whom she had first learnt the sacrament of love, had given himself to another woman, had given all that most close and sacred intimacy of love, and had written, “I cannot say with truth that I regret it.” How she had lived through the reading of those words she did not know. Grief does not kill, or surely she would have died that hour. Her own strength, and the miracle of life within her, alone stayed her longing for death. It was ten months ago; she had lived down much since then, had schooled herself daily to forgetfulness; yet now again the unutterable pang swept over her--the desolation of loss, and the incapacity to believe that such loss could be. She rebelled against the needlessness of it all now, as she had done then, in those bitter days before her little Rosamond came to half-assuage her pain. Well, he had redeemed himself in a way. The day James Farraday came to tell her that Stefan had enlisted, some part of her load was eased. The father of her children was not all ignoble. Mary mused on. How would it end? Would Stefan live? Should she--could she--ever see him again? She thanked God he was there, serving the country he loved. “The only thing he ever really loved, perhaps,” she thought. She supposed he would be killed--all that genius lost like so much more of value that the world was scrapping to-day--and then it would all be quite gone-- Through the trees dropped the insistent sound of a baby's cry to its mother. She rose; the heavy clouds of memory fell away. The past was gone; she lived for the future, and the future was in her children. * * * * * The next morning Mary had just bathed the baby, and was settling her in her carriage, when the Sparrow, who, seated on the porch with Elliston, was engaged in cutting war maps from the papers and pasting them in an enormous scrapbook, gave a warning cough. “Here comes Mr. McEwan,” she whispered, in the hushed voice reserved by her simple type for allusions to the afflicted. “Oh, poor dear,” said Mary, hurrying across the lawn to meet him. She felt more than ever sympathetic toward him, for Mac's wife had died in a New Hampshire sanitarium only a few weeks before, and all his hopes of mending her poor broken spirit were at an end. Reaching the gate, she gave an involuntary cry. McEwan was stumbling toward her almost like a drunken man. His face was red, his eyes bloodshot; a morning paper trailed loosely from his hand. “Mary,” he cried, “I came back from the station to see ye--hae ye heard, my girl?” “Wallace!” she exclaimed, frightened, “what is it? What has happened?” She led him to a seat on the porch; he sank into it unresisting. Miss Mason pushed away her scrapbook, white-faced.