“Yes,” she answered firmly, as if she were giving a command. But he read pity also in her eyes. “Abner is your second?” suggested Miss Tolley.!

She decided that their future meetings should be at his own house. Mrs. Phillips’s only complaint was that she knocked at the door too seldom. “You thought I would take advantage of it,” she suggested.

Her father had wished her to go. Arthur’s death had stirred in him the old Puritan blood with its record of long battle for liberty of conscience. If war claimed to be master of a man’s soul, then the new warfare must be against war. He remembered the saying of a Frenchwoman who had been through the Franco-Prussian war. Joan, on her return from Paris some years before, had told him of her, repeating her words: “But, of course, it would not do to tell the truth,” the old lady had said, “or we should have our children growing up to hate war.” “Good man,” said Mrs. Denton. “I’m quite serious. You tell him from me that the next revolution has got to be against the Press. And it will be the stiffest fight Democracy has ever had.” “There wasn’t much difference, so far as I could see, between them and most of us,” answered the little old lady. “You’re not married, dear,” she continued, glancing at Joan’s ungloved hand, “but people must have a deal of patience when they have to live with us for twenty-four hours a day. You see, little things we do and say without thinking, and little ways we have that we do not notice ourselves, may all the time be irritating to other people.”