of ruin and death coming down again upon your homes.

You are strong and powerful to-day, and you are able consequently to listen to our plea without, from your point of view, making any sacrifice of pride. Give us back, we beg of you, the power to dispose freely of ourselves.

Where and when could Alsace-Lorraine express her choice more clearly and with more solemnity than she has done under German domination by unanimous votes and by the declarations of her representatives? I hope that for our readers, as for ourselves, the plebiscite has already been made and its verdict. pronounced. Now that we have heard her speak for herself at Berlin before the German Reichstag, as at Bordeaux before the French National Assembly, there remains nothing for us to do but to bow before her will and to work with all our might for it to be realized.

This will, after nearly a half-century of oppression, is the same. It has varied in expression according to circumstances and the necessities of political life; but it has never changed in its basic princi

ple. It has never contradicted itself. Germany has not succeeded in winning. the hearts of Alsatians and Lorrainers either by conciliation or by violence, which is more natural to her. She has never been able in the forty-four long years to wring from Alsace-Lorraine one word of adhesion or any sign of rallying to Deutschland or Deutschtum.

After the protest of 1874 Germany revealed her real thoughts when the angry voice of Bismarck declared in the Reichstag séance of November 30th that Alsace-Lorraine was not annexed for the sake of Alsatians and Lorrainers; that Germany was indifferent to their lamentations and their anger, and that the provinces were taken from France solely to further the interests of the Empire. This cynical attitude was followed by an effort of conciliation. Manteufel was a governor full of tact and heart. But the elections of 1881 and 1884 continued to produce an important majority of protesting voices. Manteufel's successor returned to the methods of oppression and was less successful still. In the elections of February 21, 1887,

with 314,000 electors on the lists, the protesting candidates received 247,000 votes-82,000 more than in 1884!

Exasperated by this vote, which the official organ, the Strassburger Post, qualified as the "plebiscite against the Treaty of Frankfort," the German Gov

ernment had recourse to the worst kind of vexations: dissolution of most of the societies, innumerable condemnations and imprisonments, a severe censorship against the press, and finally a system of passports which raised around the annexed country a Chinese wall. It became materially impossible for Alsatians and Lorrainers to manifest as openly as in the past their fidelity to France. They limited themselves then to demanding autonomy and respect for their customs, their civilization. But beneath this calm exterior there persisted an antipathy concerning which even German opinion could not be deceived. "It is a fact," said the Chancellor von Caprivi in 1890, "that after nineteen years of annexation German influence has made no progress in Alsace." And confessions like this

Everybody knows that for three years and a half Alsace-Lorraine has been treated by Germany as an enemy country. While in the west the portion reconquered by France breathes happiness and liberty like an exile coming home, the part that is still German groans in slavery more than ever and is ceaselessly exposed to confiscations and to prison.

But already at the foot of the Vosges the armies of America have joined the French armies. Deliverance is near, and the first act of the Society of Nations will be to restore Alsace-Lorraine to the land that she loves. Humanity will henceforth know that wrongs are finally righted, and that there exists a universal tribunal to mete out the justice of God in His Heaven.

ILLICENT HAY looked about the tiny drawing-room for the twentieth time since dusk had fallen. Nineteen times her glance I had been followed by some little active gesture of rearrangement, some poke or pat or shove in the interests of comeliness. This time, however, she sat with folded hands, her eyes reaping where her hands had sown. Even to the handful of flowers on the chimneypiece, the tiny fire in the grate, the new-pressed freshness of the muchmended chintz, it was all as festal as she could make it. The little dining-room beyond was frugally unlit, but she was ready, when the bell tingled, to rush in and light the candles in the frail old sconces. Meanwhile the night roared outside; a raw wind shook sleet out of its damp garments and thrust chill fingers into all the crannies of London. Millicent shivered, for she had removed her sweater and was sitting in shabby state. The old tea-gown she wore had once been charming, with its silver lace and folds of Florentine blue; but it showed its age and weakness. The silk was shiny and thin, and a touch anywhere left a crumple. This, in spite of the fact that it had been folded away for months, to be preserved for the present occasion.

Many things had happened to postpone the imminent event, and it was nearly a year since Millicent had seen Oswald Hamlin. She had been recalled to America, her enforced departure coinciding with his return to England for a long convalescence from a bad head wound. It had been hard to leave England just as he was coming back to it from the jaws of death; hard to be unable to relieve his convalescence; hard indeed to bear so long a separation, above all at this abnormal time when hours were so fraught with doom that a month was like a lifetime. Since Oswald Hamlin "went," she had seen him only once. Letters were miserable

things; the old, delightful, epistolary game was crushed like so much gossamer in the monstrous gin of war. What was there left of the tentative complicated thing that their relation had been? In a world at peace they could have worked it out to a happy ending. Values now were so different.... All issues, physical and moral, were so crude and so tremendous. Death came into every equation. Even the buffoon must put on the tragic mask-and no understudy could hope to be let off forever. With all her mind she hated this war, and with all her heart she loved Oswald Hamlin. The year of separation had taught her that; but she had never told him, for she wished to leave him free. How could she tell what a year on the Flanders front had done to him, or whether it had chilled forever the desire that, a year ago, had almost been articulate? His letters,-censored, written by candle-flicker in mouldy, crawling billets, wrung from superhuman fatigue, subject to the war etiquette of gaietywhat were they? Her own were marvels of artificiality-enough to put any man off. You could not address tender indirections, witty subterfuge, to a man in the trenches. And now, when she could face him, she was drained of wit. Women all about her were abandoning the traditional sequences of love, "eating their leashes," as Mary Tyrwhitt roughly put it; but that was not for her. She must abandon her independence according to a time-honored program or not at all.

Then she heard the bell. Once more, as she rose, she looked about the room. Well, she had done her best to recreate the old familiar oasis; had scrimped and toiled to this end, that a simulacrum of lost amenities should, for the space of an evening, soothe them both. Her own hands had done it, for old Janet could not do much; she was more a pensioner than a servant. The younger women were all doing munitions-and living far higher than Millicent Hay on the proceeds. . . . And while she waited for

Janet to make her rheumatic way to the door, she caught her breath with sudden. fear-forgetting the dining-room candles. She knew he was disfigured-he had called himself a Man with a Puckered Cheek. Suppose she should mind! Suppose some faithless muscle of her face should show that she minded! She was trembling when the door opened on the khaki figure. For, though she scorned leash-eating, yet she knew that the flesh counted.

Lieutenant Hamlin made the most, for a moment, of the shadows. Not until their greeting was over did he move into the full lamplight by the fire. That remnant of diffidence was not strange, for he had loved this woman-would have begged her to marry him but for that shattering interruption of Flanders. He turned his maimed profile to her then, a little stiffly, as if it were a motion out of the drill manual. He showed her his grotesque cheek, unflinching. Millicent Hay gazed at it grimly, noting how the flesh was puckered and quilted, as if ghoulish fingers had done their fancywork on flesh. Then she smiled, and the relief of finding that her smile felt to herself natural and unforced made her whole face radiant.

It was with a long hand-clasp, by way of gesture, that they met so long that there was a savor of sacrament in it. The hands clung desperately, like lips meeting. Then they drew apart, and she led him into the dining-room where Janet had lighted the candles.

It was hard on Millicent Hay; for she knew that she faced, across her little table, a very complicated person; yet she had no means of knowing just how the descent into hell had affected that beloved labyrinth of nerves and inhibitions. She was aware only that the sensitive Oswald she had known would not return unscathed from that excursion. She had done her best, in recreating the old atmosphere, reproffering the old stimuli, the old context. She had fed, for weeks, on mean sandwiches and black, abominable, unsweetened tea, for the sake of decent oil for the salad, a dash of caviar for the savory, a hint of mushrooms in the sauce, a bottle of good Burgundy. She had pinned her faith to these things, though even she,

with her philosophy quite clear, had hesitated a little over the sweet white bread.

The talk had begun with the obvious gambit-decorous invitations to campaign gossip on her part, conventional replies on his. He went lightly over the historic episode of his wound. But soon talk ebbed; he had never been keen about concrete detail, and no more than of old could she expect journalism from him. She had time presently to notice that he ate like a man deprived of the sense of taste; that after one polite sip to her health he left his wine untouched. No one is so afraid of not being Martha as the woman who was obviously born Mary, and she felt alarm—and a kind of shame. Wasn't it good enough? Had her technique departed while her philosophy remained? Or wasn't it somehow English enough? Yet in the old days he had had the makings of a gourmet.

Her hands trembled a little as she mixed the salad. It was so long since she had compounded a salad with care that she fell back on the Spanish proverb, repeating it feverishly in her mind, unable to trust her fingers to perform the ritual of themselves. Things were going badly, and she could hardly believe it. She wouldn't believe it. The slowness of his smile was due, doubtless, to his wound. An abominable German shell had made his countenance incapable of expressing gaiety, had put a cynical arrière-pensée forever into his smile. She sought his eyes. They surely were the same, unfathomably and most dependably blue, good - will throned therein. But tired, oh, so tired! And pure pity set her hands to trembling again, until, hit or miss, the salad was mercifully achieved.

"Do you hate it as much as ever?" she asked, finally.

"More."

"Have you been sorry you didn't go to an O. Ť. C.?”

"No. I've seen it through better this way. I have all the right there is to hate it."

"Pacifist?" She fell normally, and with a sense of great comfort, into their old elliptical mode. "Not until it's over." Millicent nodded.

Every one she

knew felt the same. She had not set a real militarist since 1914. eyes on Even the leash-eaters cursed the conditions that had tempted them to their unnatural meal. Militarism was not fashionable, precisely. But still less was pacifism. All "isms" fell, if not literally, then constructively, under the Defense of the Realm Act.

"How was it in New York?" he counter-queried.

"Every one crazy to get in." "They'll have to, sooner or later. . . Was it a rest for you, on the whole?" "Well, they talked too much." The blue eyes glinted with sympathy. "That must have been beastly.

Millicent considered. "Yes-and no. One hated to see all that energy wasted; and yet it was a kind of blessed relief to find people free to talk as they chose again. You know how Lady Sayres works us. . . . She resents our having tongues in our heads. She'd like them all tinned for army rations. And yet, after the war, there must be a life of sorts, mustn't there? We mustn't wholly forget how to live the things that made life worth while."

"But what were the things that made life worth while?" As if unconsciously, he pushed his untouched savory a little farther from him.

Her brows tightened faintly at the gesture, but she made no comment.

"All this." And Millicent Hay smiled with charming deprecation of her festival.

"It was my loathing of it that made me enlist in K. 1." He smiled. "You remember?"

"I don't think you ever wholly explained." Though it was an old quarrel between them, her mild murmur held no vibration of ancient disagreement.

"I couldn't join an O. T. C. I didn't like the army or its ways or works. I had seen too many good friends turn into a stupid type. Of course we were up against it, and of course I had to go; but I preferred to go as an enlisted man. I thought perhaps, that way, I'd escape the destiny. If this was a new and loathsome situation, I wanted to meet it in the new way. Perhaps K. I, created for something different, would be different. Any O. T. C. would be run on the old lines, the old theories. . . The same old Procrustes' bed. . . . I I preferred to take a shot on the new thing. I may have been wrong-but so far I don't believe it."

"My only objection-ever-was that, miserably under-officered, they needed every man who by any stretch of the imagination could be considered officer stuff"

"Yes. I know. Well, I wasn't officer stuff." She pointed to his insignia. "Oh, that's all right! I worked up from the ranks. I'm the new kind of lieutenantnot the old kind.”

"Are they so different?"

"I take the liberty of thinking so." "And how?"

He smiled. "I'm afraid I must give myself away, after all. It's I who am different; perhaps the others aren't. But I'm freer in my mind, anyhow, for having been a Tommy and having been pitchforked up to this giddy height. The situation has made me, not tradition."

"Tradition was scrapped, I thought, with everything else, when they licked poor little Etonians into shape for commissions in six weeks."

"In a sense. I mean promotion from the ranks came to me in the midst of unprecedented mud and unforeknowable hell. I can't explain-but- There was no pull or privilege in it. And, while I don't object to pull or privilege for the