Upon Miss von Schwarzenberg's reappearance after luncheon, the family welcomed her with affectionate enthusiasm. Lady McIntyre established the rescued one on the sofa. Nan Ellis brought a footstool. Sir William stirred the fire.

Napier was struck by the picture of amenity and cheerfulness presented by the group.

"No, Miss Greta," said Madge, "you needn't be looking round; the papers haven't come, I'm glad to say. You've got to rest and be taken care of." She spread the shawl over Miss Greta's knees. Sir William, from the hearth-rug, beamed upon the scene.

"Eh? What? Speaking from London?" he said to the servant, who had come in with a message. "All right." So little was Sir William prepared for any important communication, he didn't even go into the library to receive it. He crossed to the telephone on the opposite side of the hall.

Napier would probably have concerned himself about the message no more than Lady McIntyre or Madge, but for the chance that made him aware of how intently Greta was taking in the swift change that came over the amiable, fussy, little figure with the receiver at his ear.

"What? What? Say that again. When? Six o'clock last night? You don't mean it was official.... God bless my soul! No, not a word. Our papers haven't come." Then a pause. "How long did you say they'd give? Not this Saturday? Why, that's to-morrow!" A pause of thirty seconds followed, Sir William hanging on to the receiver, listening.

"I'll think it over," he said excitedly. "I'll call you up later. Good-by." When he had hung up the receiver, he still stood there, rooted, looking through the wall at some astonishing happening far off.

"William," Lady McIntyre started up, "it's not about the boys!"

"Boys? No. God bless my soul! nothing whatever to do with the boys."

"Oh, only some government matter." With a clearing brow she settled again in her corner.

Sir William turned about, and went with quick, fussy, little steps into the library.

Napier followed his chief a moment after, only to be told to go and send a couple of messages. "Hall telephone." Sir William spoke shortly. He sat, elbows on table, head in hands, staring straight before him at some staggering vision.

As Napier stood waiting to get his call through, Miss Greta came over to the writing-table and took the address-book out of the stand. Madge hitched herself up on the end of the table nearest the telephone and sat swinging her long legs.

"What's up?" she demanded, with her laughing impudence.

"Is anything up?" Napier asked.

"There, Miss Greta, didn't I tell you? It's boring enough of Father to pinch up his lips and go out of the room like that when he gets some news that would be so nice and interesting for us all."

"Sir William is quite right. A member of the Government never talks in private about official business."

"Oh, doesn't he?"—Wildfire tossed back her mane. "You know perfectly well Father's discretion lasts only as long as the first shock of any piece of news. He thinks he's done all he's called on to do when he doesn't tell us that minute. If you wait, you're safe to hear what it's all about."

"My dear Madge!" remonstrated Miss Greta, sweetly. It was taking her a long time to verify that address.

Patience incarnate at the telephone having refused to deal with two underlings in turn, waited now for the station master to be fetched. "Is that the station master? Well, look here. Is the new express running yet? Yes, what time? I'm speaking from Kirklamont for Sir William McIntyre. He must catch that train. Yes, motoring to—Yes. You could hold it a minute or two, I suppose, if—All right." He had no sooner rung off, than he rang on. "Give me the motor-house." And still Miss Greta sat there, till she heard that the new car was to come round in time for Sir William to catch the four o'clock express at the junction.

As Napier rang off again, his chief was back in the hall, giving directions to a servant about packing a traveling bag. Sir William's family appeared not the least excited at the prospect of the sudden journey. They were too well accustomed to his bustling ways. But Sir William himself had the air of being even more wrought up, now that he'd had time to think over his news, than he had been on receiving it. He stood frowning and working his eyebrows as the conversation in the hall died and the company waited for the enlightenment which Madge had foretold was sure to come.

"Madness!" He flung it out to an invisible audience. "Madness!"

"Oh, Ireland!" said Lady McIntyre, certain of the inevitable connection.

"Ireland? Not at all. Austria."

Miss Greta, her envelope in hand, had turned about in her chair and looked over the back of it, her round head slightly on one side in an attitude of polite attention. Very different from the form adopted by the ladies of Sir William's own family, secure as they were in their knowledge that Sir William would unburden himself.

They seemed disposed to look upon the news, when it did come, as something of an anticlimax, for Sir William preceded his launching of the fact with an increased activity of eyebrow and a furious jingling of seals. "Austria," he said, "has sent an ultimatum to Servia."

"Oh, is that all?" Lady McIntyre's last lingering fear was laid to rest.

"Couched in such terms," Sir William went on, "as no self-respecting nation could accept."

Miss Greta's air of elaborate deference suffered no change. She heard that the Austrian Government was plainly composed of a set of Bedlamites, "scratching matches in a powder-magazine."

Sir William seemed to have his excitement, his anxiety, all to himself, till Mr. Grant came in with Nan Ellis. Even then, Sir William had only one person with whom to share the graver implications in the news.

You'd say Julian neither heard nor saw the girl he had been frankly adoring as they came in. Question after question he fired at Sir William, rather as though that gentleman were responsible for the impasse. "What! Servia is to take it or leave it en bloc by to-morrow night? Why, that means there's less than twenty hours between Europe and—" he stopped appalled.

They still called it Servia at this date.

"Europe?" said Miss Greta, gently. "You mean Servia."

The butler came in with the belated papers.

Sir William snatched up the "Times." He glanced quickly at headlines.

"They don't make much of it," Napier said.

"Naturally," Miss Greta excused them. "They are full of their own difficulty."

"What do you call their own difficulty?" Napier asked, as he paused to turn the paper.

"Why, Ireland," she answered promptly.

Napier found himself looking at her.

"There are some sane people even in Ireland," Sir William threw out over the top of his paper. "But this—this Austrian madness. No warning, no parley; a pistol to Servia's head!"

Julian's voice over-topped Sir William's. "It amounts to the abject humiliation of Servia—or war."

"Servia will accept Austria's terms," said Miss Greta, quietly.

"Never!" Julian shouted. "All the chancelleries of Europe will join in protest."

Sir William paused in his trot up and down that end of the hall. "If Russia goes in, Germany can't stay out. This time to-morrow Europe may be ablaze."

The supposition, sounding through those piping times of peace, rang fantastic. Napier remembered, long after, how he had looked round Kirklamont hall and saw that apart from Sir William there wasn't a soul there who believed in the possibility of war, except one. That one—Miss Greta.

"Monstrous as it would be to force Servia into political slavery," Julian admitted gravely, "there would be one thing worse."

Nan at last lifted her voice. "What would the worst thing be?"

"War," answered Julian.

"What, what!" Sir William caught him up. "There are worse things than war, young man."

"There's nothing worse than war. Fortunately, we've reached a place where the mass of the people know that."

As the awful prospect unfolded, people were not appalled, though they said they were. They weren't even unhappy. They were far too excited. And to be excited about matters of world-wide importance is to be lifted out of the petty round and to catch at the crumbs of greatness.

Napier went up to town with Sir William. At close quarters with official minds, the younger man shared those hours of anxious hope, bred by the earlier interchange between Petersburg and Berlin, London and Belgrade.

Still, and without ceasing, though too late, as was seen in the retrospect, England worked for peace.

Not even the formal declaration of war on Servia, made by Austria on the Tuesday following that fateful Friday, arrested the effort of the British Government to avert the catastrophe.

Five days after the ultimatum discussion in Kirklamont Hall, the German demand was made for British neutrality and the first shots were fired at Belgrade.

Julian's letters in those days registered merely the seething and boiling in the caldron of his separatist soul. His horror of the Mittel-Europa plot, as it began to unroll, was lost in his horror of the spread, the deliberate inflammation, of what he called the "war cancer."

Napier flung the letters into the waste-paper basket and forgot them. But as he went about his work, transmitting cryptic telephone calls or hurrying to and fro with confidential messages, all incongruously a girl's face would flicker before him like a white flower before the eyes of one running at top speed through danger-haunted woods at night.

Those were the hours when Great Britain was pressing the most momentous question ever framed by diplomacy: Was France, was Germany, going to respect the neutrality of Belgium? Then the moment when France cried, "Yes," and Germany's silence was louder in the instructed ear than roar of cannon.

Sir William had sat in the war councils, and hour after hour sat in smaller groups, laboring with the best minds to find a way to stay the spread of the contagion. When Sir William came to a place where nothing more could be hoped for or immediately be done, he found that, for the first time in his life, he was unable to sleep. Country air, home, if only for a single round of the clock.

They came back to Kirklamont to find, in outward seeming, all unchanged. The fact struck sharply on the strained senses of the two men who drove up from Inverness toward noon on the first Monday in that fateful August. Late Saturday night Germany had declared war on Russia, and France was already invaded.

In the hall at Kirklamont Lady McIntyre sat with her family, her Russian embroidery, and her boarhounds. She came to meet her husband with, "William, dear! And what's the news?"

Madge ran, her red hair all abroad, to embrace her father. Bobby, on the point of going upstairs, changed his mind.

Sir William met interrogation testily.

Gavan Napier's first impression on entering the hall had been of the still intensity of Miss Greta's gaze; perhaps he was the more struck by it because it wasn't on himself. On Sir William. As she closed the book she'd been reading aloud and rose, the look was gone. Amid the heats of midsummer and of war she stood cool, pearl-powdery, sweet, with a smile for Napier now, and an expression of deferential welcome for Sir William. Miss Greta left to other folk all worrying questions aimed at jaded and travel-worn men.

No, Sir William wasn't going to sleep till after luncheon. But he was hot and dusty, he would go up....

They would have tackled Napier, but he, too, escaped hard upon Sir William's heels.

As Napier followed his chief down three quarters of an hour later, a laugh floated up. Nan Ellis.

She and Bobby sat on the sofa, taking and giving lessons in the tying of sailors' knots. She looked up carelessly enough at Napier's appearance. "How do you do? Do you know any good knots? I thought you wouldn't."

"She is prettier than I remembered," he said to himself.

Sir William, on the hearth-rug, showed a man already refreshed.

"What's this about the papers?" This raised voice commanded the hall.

"Yes, my dear William, for the third time. That was why we had to try to get our news from London. But they were horrid, yesterday, about telling us anything. It's not very pleasant,"—Lady McIntyre revealed her conception of the use of war news—"when neighbors call, expecting us to know the latest, and find we haven't heard a word since Saturday morning."

"Well, then,"—Sir William filled the hiatus with a single sentence—"at seven o'clock on Saturday evening Germany declared war on Russia."

Instantly the hall was full of hubbub. The excitement bred by that tremendous fact reached even Lady McIntyre. "Dear me! I wonder what the Pforzheims will say to that. They will be astonished."

Miss Greta went through the motions of surprise. "Has it really come?"

Napier, observing her narrowly, said to himself. "She knew." And then, "How did she know?"

Julian Grant came hurrying in with excited face. Before he had spoken to anybody else or so much as looked at Nan: "Tell us, Sir William; it's only in the country, isn't it, that people are talking wildly about England being mixed up in this horrible business?"

"People talk everywhere," Sir William said crustily.

After Sir William's rebuff, Julian had gone over and sat down by Nan. It was Miss Greta who did the talking.

Napier saw her leaning across Nan to engage Mr. Grant. Most gentle she was, ingratiating. As he strolled nearer, Napier heard one or two of her leading questions, put with an air of having no idea how straight they went to the heart of the matter.

"Oh, you think that? I should so like to know why."

Sir William, pretending not to listen, pretending to talk to Madge, lost no word; neither Julian's denunciation of the idea of England's interfering, nor Miss Greta's, "Well, it would be quixotic. And whatever her enemies may say, England is not quixotic." It was the kind of little compliment with a sting in its tail that Miss Greta could deliver with an innocence that must, Napier decided, console her for many an enforced piece of self-suppression.

"'Quixotic!'" Julian began to tell how much worse it would be than that.

Fury rose in Sir William. Napier saw it getting into his eyebrows. Miss Greta saw it, too, Napier could have sworn. Oh, she knew perfectly what she was about. "It is difficult,"—she supplemented Julian's assurance—"very difficult, to see how England could come in, with civil war ready to break out at any minute. She would be sacrificing herself for what?" Miss Greta inquired in her suave voice.

"The statesman who would advocate it," said Julian, "would be committing suicide."

Sir William swung round. "You're wide enough of the mark this time."

"You don't mean—"

"Our obligations to France—" Sir William began.

"What obligations?" the young man demanded. "The country hasn't endorsed any obligations." He jumped up and faced Sir William on the hearth-rug. "If behind our backs they've gone and committed us—" Julian's dark eyes flashed a threat of dire reprisal. Provisionally he wiped the floor with those (including, all too flagrantly, the Laird of Kirklamont) who might, "in their colossal ineptitude, want to commit this nation to war."

"That's your opinion," said Sir William, growing bright red under the friction. "You seem to think we have no right to ours."

Julian halted an instant before the problem. "How much right has a man to the wrong opinion?" Upon the answer to that, he knew, had hung much of the history of politics and religion. In another mood Julian would have maintained, till all was blue, that an intelligent bricklayer had as much right to a voice in the policy of the country as a peer of the realm. None the less, in his heart of hearts, as Napier was whimsically aware, Sir Julian felt that, for all Sir William's official position, he hadn't any such valid right to press his views as had a Grant of Abergarry. Between mirth and consternation, Napier realized that this was the key to the renewed outpouring. It was not so much Julian, but a Grant, very properly telling a McIntyre things good for him to know.

In the heat and fury of the discussion which she had so adroitly precipitated, Miss Greta stretched out a hand and took up her knitting. She sat there with bent head.

"Who? The democracy of England!" Julian was crying to Sir William's angry, "Who is going to prevent?"

"If politicians don't know that, they'll learn it to their cost. English participation in this war is impossible."

"So little impossible," Sir William barked back, "that we'll be in it up to the neck."

There was a moment's hush in the hall, before everybody, except Miss Greta, began to talk at once. Miss Greta never lifted her head. She did not so much as lift her eyes. Napier saw that she was following the success of her ruse with an intensity that held her hands immovable, as though the rapid fingers had been caught, tied fast, in those "field-gray" filaments she wove, as though her palms had been skewered through by the shining steel of her long needles. They stuck out at right angles, seeming to transfix the rigid, death-white hands.

"Never! never!" Julian had cried out at the top of his voice.

"And if we weren't in it," Sir William shouted, "we'd be wiped off the map. What's more, we'd deserve to be."

"I tell you," Julian vociferated, "England will never consent to be dragged into this quarrel."

"England won't be dragged in. She will go in because it would be a shame to keep out. She is in!"

Napier sat damning himself with uncommon vigor. Idiot! that he hadn't foreseen the Von Schwarzenberg's agile apprehension of this new use to which Nanchen's lover might be put. Too late the realization that her baulked eagerness for official news had made her egg on Julian to engage his fellow Scot at their real "national game"—which isn't golf at all. Debate's the name of it. Those two played it with passion. Nothing could stop them now. Sir William trumpeted at Julian, and Julian skirled wildly back. The hall was in confusion.

"You said England never would," Nan cried across to Miss Greta.

"I said she wouldn't be so ill-advised," was the barely audible answer.

The shell-shock of Sir William's bomb had shaken even Greta von Schwarzenberg. From that first impact she recovered her mental poise at a price. Her face was white with the cost of it, or under the tension of some immediate decision. It suddenly came over Napier: she wants more than anything on earth to warn the Pforzheims.

She made a slight movement. It brought the clock within range. Five minutes to luncheon time. "Five minutes," Napier said to himself, "in which to get the news to Glenfallon," if he didn't prevent her.