In the midst of a quotation from Faraday on the general strike as a certain preventive of war, he broke off suddenly to appeal to her with: "Every one thought he was right. He seemed so sure. I didn’t see how he could be wrong!" She noticed that, wherever their talk might stray, he came back, time and again, to his central fact—that the blankly impossible had happened and the jest was a brutal truth. That, in the beginning, was all his mind had laid hold of; now, the first stage of amazement over, he was groping instinctively, and perhaps unconsciously, after rights and wrongs of quarrel, and striving to understand how the impossible had come into existence. Edith Haynes had not passed her life in the atmosphere of Internationalism, and would have been more than human had she been an impartial guide to him where the causes of war were concerned—just as he would have been more than human had he been capable of impartial guidance. What he lacked in patriotism he made up in personal suffering; he hated the German because he had been robbed of his wife, and it added but little to the fire of his hatred to learn of faith broken with Belgium. If he listened intently when she told of it, if he pored over newspaper paragraphs dealing with German cruelty to the conquered, it was because they fitted with his mood and justified the loathing in his soul. It was his persistent poring over English newspapers that brought him in the end the salvation of a definite purpose. An article in _The Daily Chronicle_—some days old—described the beginning of the recruiting campaign for the raising of Kitchener’s Army; he read it as he read everything else that explained or described the war. At first the article was nothing but news to him, a mere statement of facts; but as he read further a meaning flamed into the news. Bereft as he was of guidance, his mind swinging rudderless in chaos, he was waiting unconsciously for the man or the impulse that could seize on his helpless emotion and give purpose and direction to his life; thus the journalist’s vigorous appeal to the nation’s patriotism was driven home by the force of his own experience and became an appeal to himself. The writer had illustrated his argument in the obvious manner, by reference to the condition of invaded Belgium and the suffering of her people under the hand and heel of the enemy; he wrote of women outraged, of hostages killed, of cities laid waste, and of houses fired with intention. He was spurred by indignation, by pity and a natural patriotism, and had laid on his colours—to all but William—with a vivid and forcible pen. To William, as he read, the result seemed lame and pitiful, an inadequate babbling of the living horrors that had burned themselves into his soul; but for all its weakness—perhaps because of it—the article gave him the impulse for which he had been waiting in torment. It may have been his very sense of the inadequacy with which