“You don’t mean a party?” asked Joan. “It isn’t going to be the Daily This and the Daily That and the Weekly the Other all combined to down me. I’m going to tell the people that it’s Carleton and only Carleton—Carleton here, Carleton there, Carleton everywhere, against them. I’m going to drag him out into the open and make him put up his own fists.”!

He did not reply to her question. “Master or Mistress Eminent Artist,” he said; “intends to retire from his or her particular stage, whatever it may be. That paragraph ought always to be put among the obituary notices.” “I do not know,” she answered. “He was not the regular Incumbent. But it was someone that I seemed to know quite well—that I must have been familiar with.”

Suddenly she heard a light step in the passage, and the room door opened. A girl entered. She was wearing a large black hat and a black boa round her neck. Between them her face shone unnaturally white. She carried a small cloth bag. She started, on seeing Joan, and seemed about to retreat. “There’s something bigger coming,” he said. “Here everything seems to be going on much the same, but over there you feel it. Something growing silently out of all this blood and mud. I find myself wondering what the men are staring at, but when I look there’s nothing as far as my field-glasses will reach but waste and desolation. And it isn’t only on the faces of our own men. It’s in the eyes of the prisoners too. As if they saw something. A funny ending to the war, if the people began to think.” “Oh, may I?” answered Joan.