accept miracles--more later, when I cool down. But Nagar is great to me in himself. I think I find him more interesting, even than Gandhi. Sometimes he seems to contain Gandhi. But it would smash everything I have to work with, if I gave either one of them my entire belief. Yet I dread the thought of going away.... The letter from Nagar was then read slowly twice, and the smile on the face of Miss Claes gradually lost itself in a blur of white, as if twilight had crept into the basement room. ... The American whom we know never speaks directly of the one he loves; it does not seem to occur to him that we have sympathy that enfolds his secrets. He asks questions--asks questions. He shakes his head. His college-trained intellect does not reach up, does not hold up its cup to receive the synthesis. It moves wearily from one to another of its separate analyses, with only rarely a connective flash of intuition. But his heart keeps burning, yearning all the time, and as he learns, he acts. So he seems very safe.... I have wished so often that he were going to you, instead of to his work in Europe, but that, of course, is selfish. He has his work there. We must hold him between us. He knows already that he will not be able to see and feel in France, as he does here. It is his ordeal. I have told him many times; every day, in fact, that what he sees and feels here, he must remember there, and hold to, until it is made working knowledge within him.... Our work is merely preparing. The Little Man, as Richard calls him affectionately from that old story, realizes that the hour is not yet. We work in the midst of many shades of darkness and obliquity and inhibition. We are marking time, marking time.... Our American will return to India in time to see the Day break. I have promised to keep him informed. As Paul Richard says, “We must prepare in ourselves that magnificent day.” Miss Claes sat in silence. Then she seemed to become aware that voices above vaguely distracted. She went to the door, and listened. Fanny Gallup was crying, with little care who heard. XXXII FRANCE, 1918. THE YANK DICKY hadn’t had his clothes off for several days. He was in the “Oregon” Forest with Colonel Boulding who was no sort of man to tie to for one who felt that a clean washrag was one of the necessities of life. Dicky hadn’t cared for strenuous field work but it had come to him in France; not the actions of the big fields so much as the extraordinary little back-line dramas that break the laws of perspective by rising more clearly, as days drew on. Four days before, on his way in to Paris, he had met Boulding, who was taking out several fresh battalions to relieve a hard-pressed front at St. Aignan. “I’ve got an extra horse,” said Boulding, “good old Yorick, steady as a tram-car, and we’ll be back in three days.”