While Jim and Charity sat by the roadside the Marchioness of Strathdene, nÉe Kedzie Thropp, of Nimrim, sat on a fine cushion and salted with her tears the toasted English crumpet she was having with her tea.

She had been married indeed, but the same ban that fell upon Jim's remarriage had forbidden her the wedding of her dreams. She was the innocent party to the divorce and she was married in a church. But it was not of the Episcopal creed, which she was now calling the Church of England. Kedzie-like, she still wanted what she could not get and grieved over what she got. It is usual to berate people of her sort, but they are no more to be blamed than other dyspeptics. Souls, like stomachs, cannot always coordinate appetite and digestion.

Kedzie had, however, found a husband who would be permanently precious to her, since she would never be certain of him. Like her, he was restless, volatile, and maintained his equilibrium as a bicycle does only by keeping on going. He was mad to be off to the clouds of France. There was a delay because ships were sailing infrequently, and their departure was kept secret. Passengers had to go aboard and wait.

Bidding “bon voyage” was no longer the stupid dock-party platitude it had been. It was bidding “good-by” with faint hope of “au revoir.” Ladies going abroad, even brides, thought little of their deck costumes so long as they included a well-tailored life-preserver.

Mrs. Thropp stared at Kedzie and breathed hard in her creaking satin. And Adna looked out at her over the high collar that took a nip at his Adam's apple every time he swallowed it.

The old parents were sad with an unwonted sorrow. They had money at last and they had even been hauled up close to the aristocracy as the tail to Kite Kedzie. But now they had time to realize that they were to lose this pretty thing they had somehow been responsible for yet unable to control. They had nearly everything else, so their child was to be taken from them.

Suddenly they loved her with a grave-side ache. She was their baby, their little girl, their youth, their beauty, their romance, their daughter. And perhaps in a few days she would be shattered and dead in a torpedoed ship. Perhaps in some high-flung lifeboat she would be crouching all drenched and stuttering with cold and dying with terror.

Mrs. Thropp broke into big sobs that jolted her sides and she fell over against Adna, who did not know how to comfort her. He held her in arms like a bear's and patted her with heavy paws, but she felt on her head the drip-drip of his tears. And thus Kedzie by her departure brought them together in a remarriage, a poor sort of honeymoon wherein they had little but the bitter-sweet privilege of helping each other suffer.

The picture of their welded misery brought Kedzie a return, too, to her child hunger for parentage. She wanted a mother and a father and she could not have them. She went to put her exquisite arms about them and the three so dissimilar heads were grotesquely united.

The Marquess of Strathdene pretended to be disgusted and stormed out. But that was because he did not want to be seen making an ass of himself, weeping as Bottom the Weaver wept. He flung away his salted and extinguished cigarette and wondered what was the matter with the world where nothing ever came out right.

His own mother was weeping all the time and her letters told always of new losses. The newspapers kept printing stories of Strathdene's chums being put away in a trench or a hospital, or falling from the clouds dead.

And starvation was coming everywhere; in England there was talk of famine, and all America had gone mad with fear of it. But still the war went on in a universal suicide which nobody could stop, and peace, the one thing that everybody wanted, was wanted by nobody on any terms that anybody else would even discuss.

As he agonized with his philosophy and lighted another cigarette, the street roared like hurricane. Below the windows the French Mission was proceeding up Fifth Avenue. Marechal Joseph Joffre and Rene Viviani were awakening tumult in the American heart and stirring it to the rescue of France and of England and of Belgium and Italy, with what outcome none could know. One could only know that at last the great flood of war had encircled the United States, reducing it to the old primeval problems and emotions: how to get enough to eat, how to get weapons, how to find and beat down the enemy, how to endure the farewells of fathers, mothers, sons, sisters, sweethearts, wives. Everything was complex beyond understanding for minds, but things were very simple for hearts; they had only to ache with sorrow or wrath.

The Marchioness of Strathdene and her airy husband reached England without being submarined, and there, to her great surprise, Kedzie found a whole new universe of things not quite right. “If only it were otherwise!” was still the perpetual alibi of contentment.