He said to himself daily, "I am of no use on the earth; thirty-five--a fortune I did not earn, an education, relations, experiences prepared for me; a profession adopted as a refuge in a time of need; a citizen of a country in which I have not taken root; an accident in the only spot on earth where I've ever done an honest day's work; the very companions of my student days throwing themselves into a noble struggle in which I would gladly die and from which I'm hopelessly debarred. A useless bit of drifting wreckage, why live?" It was the victory of the Marne which, coming as it did at the moment of his deepest despair, pulled Dick back into something like normal courage and cheer. The probability that Paris would fall into German hands had filled him with horror. When he read the first headlines of the turn of the battle, he had bowed his head and sobbed aloud, "Thank God, thank God." All over the land that September morning hundreds of Americans who knew and loved their France like Dick, sobbed broken thanks to the Almighty. If for the millions it was simply an amazing turn in the war, an unexpected proof that Germany was not as invulnerable as she had made them believe, for these hundreds it was a relief from a pain that had become intolerable. Dick was not the only one in Sabinsport, however, that the victory of the Marne stirred to the depths. John A. Papalogos hung out a French flag over his fruit and startled the children by giving them handfuls of his wares, the grown-ups by his reckless measures and everybody by an abandon of enthusiasm which not a few regarded as suspicious. "Must have been drinking," Mary Sabins told Tom when he came home for lunch. At the mines the effect was serious. The Slavs fell on the Austrians and beat them unmercifully. It was the only way they knew to answer the arrogance that the German advance had brought out. It was worth noting that in the general mêlée the Italian miners sided with the Slavs. The barrier between Dick and Ralph was still up when Patsy arrived. They all knew by this time something of what the girl had seen between her letter of August 10th mailed in Brussels and her arrival in London the twenty-first. Held by the unwillingness of Mr. Laurence to allow his wife to travel until she was stronger and by his inability to believe that the invasion of Belgium could be the monstrous thing it proved and by his complacent faith that nothing anyway could harm an American business man, it was not until the 19th he obeyed the imperative order of the embassy to go while he could. In those days of waiting, Patsy had come into daily contact with the horrors and miseries of war. She had seen Brussels filling up with wounded, had spent lavishly of her strength and of Laurence money in helping improvise hospitals and in feeding, nursing and comforting refugees. She had lived years in days.