She examined the photograph with a kind of curiosity. In this new sense of the reality of death, the rattle of the traffic outside had grown strange and dreamlike, and the rattle of the tea-things and the smell of the buttered toast which an assiduous, but discreet landlady placed at her side, seemed as fantastic and remote as any fairy-tale. All the trivial details of the life around her had assumed a new and mysterious quality. She seemed to be moving in a phantasmagorical world. The round red face of the landlady came and went like the goblin things you may see over your shoulder in a looking-glass at twilight. And the center of all this insubstantial dream-stuff was that one vivid oblong of loose earth, marked with two sticks of kindling wood, in the neat and sharply defined official photograph. There was something that looked like a black thread entwining the arms of the tiny cross; and she puzzled over it stupidly, wondering what it could be. "I suppose I could write and ask," she said to herself. Then an over-mastering desire seized her. She must go and see it. She must go and see the one fragment of the earth that remained to her, if only for the reason that there, perhaps, she might find the relief of tears. But she had another reason also, a reason that she would never formulate, even to herself, an over-mastering impulse from the depths of her being. May Margaret had no intimate friends in London. She had established herself in these London lodgings with the cosmopolitan independence of the American girl, whose own country contains distances as great as that from London to Petrograd. The world shrinks a little when your own country is a continent; and it was with no sense of remoteness that she now went to the telephone and rang up the London office of the _Chicago Bulletin_. "I want to speak to Mr. Harvey," she said. "Is this Mr. Harvey? This is Mrs. Davidson,--Margaret Grant--you remember, don't you? I want to see you about something very important. You are sending people out to the front all the time, aren't you, in connection with your newspapers? Well, I want to know if you can arrange for me to go.... Yes, as a woman correspondent.... Oh, they don't allow it? Not at the British front?... Well, I've got to arrange it somehow.... Won't you come and see me and talk it over?... All right, at six-thirty. Good-by." The official photograph was still in her hand when Mr. William K. Harvey, of the _Chicago Bulletin_, was announced. He was a very young man to be managing the London office of a great newspaper, but this was not a disadvantage for May Margaret's purpose. "So you want to go to the front," he said, settling down into the arm-chair on the other side of the fire. "It would certainly make a great story. We ought to be able to syndicate it all through the Middle West; but you'll have to give up the idea of the British front. We might manage the French front, I think."