"His father died later. I think myself his heart was broken." She lifted protesting eyes. "Is it worth it? ... these broken hearts and broken lives--the price of territorial gain! It is too much to pay for any country's aggrandisement. And the bitterness to me lay in the knowledge that it was my own country inflicting this injustice on a weaker people. I cannot convey all I suffered. I was treated with great indignity--a prisoner in my own house, where I remained with my three youngest children. I wasn't allowed outside the house save by permit, and it was with difficulty I obtained that. I insisted on seeing the officer in charge, and informed him I was an Englishwoman. He was very rough with me, and told me to be careful or I might find myself interned also. "Oh! I cannot describe the misery and the hopelessness of that time. I don't know how I lived through it; but one learns to endure. Now you know why I am bitter, why my children are bitter, against the English. They have nothing to teach them love of reverence for England--the nation that made them orphans, and treated their mother harshly. These wrongs live in the memory--they embitter life." "Yes," he said, and was silent. It was so difficult to say anything in face of what he had heard. It was because he saw her point of view so clearly, sympathised with her in her sorrow, that he found it impossible to attempt to point out that she was taking an altogether wrong view. Her judgment was biassed. In no question concerning the community is the individual point of view the one to be considered. But one can't say these things to a woman who has suffered deeply. Suddenly he put out a hand and laid it upon hers. There was something in his action, in the firm reassuring grip of his fingers, that moved her more than he knew. It was as the outstretched hand of a fellow-countryman gripping hers in the wilderness; it conveyed hope and comfort. "I say, I'm awfully sorry," he said. He pressed her hand firmly and then released it and sat looking away from her, considering a while. "It's so often the case," he said presently, "that authority gets into the wrong hands. Men find themselves in responsible positions who are not fitted for responsibility, and they make a mess of things. In war, of course, injustice is inevitable; it's not possible to discriminate. Aren't you being unjust in your turn by impugning all Englishmen because one, or even more than one, during a time of intense mental strain, treated you without consideration?" ... She made no response; and he continued almost immediately: