* The Second Revolt was truly international.  It was a colossal plan—­too colossal to be wrought by the genius of one man alone.  Labor, in all the oligarchies of the world, was prepared to rise at the signal.  Germany, Italy, France, and all Australasia were labor countries—­socialist states.  They were ready to lend aid to the revolution.  Gallantly they did; and it was for this reason, when the Second Revolt was crushed, that they, too, were crushed by the united oligarchies of the world, their socialist governments being replaced by oligarchical governments.

You see, I am full of what is impending.  I have lived it day and night utterly and for so long that it is ever present in my mind.  For that matter, I cannot think of my husband without thinking of it.  He was the soul of it, and how can I possibly separate the two in thought?

As I have said, there is much light that I alone can throw upon his character.  It is well known that he toiled hard for liberty and suffered sore.  How hard he toiled and how greatly he suffered, I well know; for I have been with him during these twenty anxious years and I know his patience, his untiring effort, his infinite devotion to the Cause for which, only two months gone, he laid down his life.

I shall try to write simply and to tell here how Ernest Everhard entered my life—­how I first met him, how he grew until I became a part of him, and the tremendous changes he wrought in my life.  In this way may you look at him through my eyes and learn him as I learned him—­in all save the things too secret and sweet for me to tell.

It was in February, 1912, that I first met him, when, as a guest of my father’s* at dinner, he came to our house in Berkeley.  I cannot say that my very first impression of him was favorable.  He was one of many at dinner, and in the drawing-room where we gathered and waited for all to arrive, he made a rather incongruous appearance.  It was “preacher’s night,” as my father privately called it, and Ernest was certainly out of place in the midst of the churchmen.

* John Cunningham, Avis Everhard’s father, was a professor at the State University at Berkeley, California.  His chosen field was physics, and in addition he did much original research and was greatly distinguished as a scientist.  His chief contribution to science was his studies of the electron and his monumental work on the “Identification of Matter and Energy,” wherein he established, beyond cavil and for all time, that the ultimate unit of matter and the ultimate unit of force were identical.  This idea had been earlier advanced, but not demonstrated, by Sir Oliver Lodge and other students in the new field of radio-activity.

In the first place, his clothes did not fit him.  He wore a ready-made suit of dark cloth that was ill adjusted to his body.  In fact, no ready-made suit of clothes ever could fit his body.  And on