And so on and on--a gurgling, happy, altogether care-free letter, calculated above all to make a young man who still was unconscious that he was in danger, read it and re-read it and say to himself that a girl who could write like that at twenty-four must be a very giddy person, and then to wake up in the night with an entirely irrelevant thought--"She didn't say whether Henry is married. Confound him." If Patsy had calculated her effect--which she had not, for she herself was unconscious of why she wrote these bubbling letters so unlike her usual ones, she could not have done better. "I wonder where Patsy is to-day," said Dick to himself. "I hope they turned back," but he said nothing to Ralph of his disquiet. It took that young man forty-eight hours longer to realize that Patsy might be caught in some unpleasant trap. He called up Dick. "The papers say there's a panic among our tourists, Dick. Do you suppose that hits Patsy? Don't you think we better drive out and see if the old folks have heard from her?" It was Sunday afternoon of August 2nd that they went out. Mr. and Mrs. McCullon were quite serene. "Here's a letter from Patsy," they said. "Last we've heard." It was from Paris, the 20th, two days later than theirs, the night before they started. "She ought to be in Brussels to-day. They say they're worried over there about getting home. I guess Patsy can take care of herself all right. Glad she's with some real live American business men--these Laurences seem to have pretty big foreign interests. Patsy's all right with them." "Of course she is," agreed Ralph. "Besides, Belgium's a good place to be now. Belgium has a treaty with all her neighbors to keep off her soil. France and Germany keep a strip specially for fighting purposes. Couldn't be a better place for Patsy." And Ralph quite honestly believed it. But it was a different thing to Dick. He was oppressed, bewildered, alarmed. He couldn't have told just what he feared. The world seemed suddenly black and all roads closed. But at least he would keep his depression to himself. He knew how entirely unreasonable it would seem to all Sabinsport.