“It must be stopped,” he said, as he got out of the train.  “I’ll think of a way in my bath to-morrow.”  This was always the moment he looked forward to for inspirations.

Anonyma was observable as he walked from the station to the inn, craning extravagantly from the sitting-room window.  She came downstairs, and met him at the door.

“Such a disaster,” she said, and handed him a telegram.

Kew stood aghast, as she meant him to.  No disaster is ever so great as it is before you know what it is.  But Kew ought to have known Anonyma’s disasters by experience.

“Russ’s wife has appeared.”

“Why should she be introduced as a disaster?” asked Kew, with a sigh of relief.  “Is she a maniac, or a suffragette, or a Mormon, or just some one who has never read any of your books?”

He opened the telegram.  It called upon him to rejoin his battalion next day at noon.

“Russ went to his house to fetch something this morning and found his wife there.  He looks quite ill.  She insisted on coming here with him, and now she wishes to go on the tour with us.  As I hear the car is hers, we can hardly refuse.”

“I don’t pretend to understand the subtleties of this disaster,” said Kew.  “But as you evidently don’t intend me to, I will not try.  Notice, however, that I am keeping my head.  I have always wondered how I should behave in a disaster.”

“Wait till you meet her,” said Anonyma.

Kew heard Mrs. Russell’s melodramatic laughter as he approached the sitting-room door, and he trembled.  She laughed “Ha-ha-ha” in a concise way, and the sound was constant.

“That is her ready sense of fun that you can hear,” said Anonyma bitterly.  “She is teaching Gustus to see the humorous side.”

They entered to find poor Cousin Gustus bending like a reed before a perfect gale of “Ha-ha-ha’s.”  Mrs. Russell was so much interested in what she was saying that she left Kew on her leeward side for the moment, hardly looking at him as she shook hands.

“It’s enough to make the gods laugh on Olympus,” she said, but it did not make Cousin Gustus laugh.  Noticing this, Mrs. Russell turned to Kew.

“I was telling your cousin about my pacificist efforts in the States,” she said.  “Yes, I can see your eye twinkling; I know a pacifist is a funny thing to be.  But I’m not one of the—­what I call dumpy-toad-in-the-hole ones.  I do it all joyously.  I was telling your cousin how very small was the chance that robbed us of success in Ohio.”

“What sort of success?” asked Kew.

“Peace,” said Mrs. Russell.

“But is Ohio at war?”

Mrs. Russell laughed heartily.  Her unnecessarily frank laughter showed her gums as well as her teeth, and made one wish that her sense of humour were not quite so keen.