The stranger suddenly pulled out his watch at the word.  “Good Heavens!” he called out.  “It’s twenty minutes of eleven, and I have to take the eleven-o’clock train to Boston.  I must bid you good-evening, gentlemen.  I’ve just time to get it if I can catch a cab.  Good-night, good-night.  I hope if you come to Boston—­eh—­Good-night!  Sometimes,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve thought it might have been that girl in the stateroom that started the dreaming.”

He had wrung our hands one after another, and now he ran out of the room.

Rulledge said, in appeal to Wanhope:  “I don’t see how his being the dreamer invalidates the case, if his dreams affected the others.”

“Well,” Wanhope answered, thoughtfully, “that depends.”

“And what do you think of its being the girl in the stateroom?”

“That would be very interesting.”

V

EDITHA

The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm which has not yet burst.  Editha sat looking out into the hot spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the question whether she could let him go.  She had decided that she could not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still leafless avenue, making slowly up towards the house, with his head down and his figure relaxed.  She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the edge of the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her will before she called aloud to him:  “George!”

He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence, before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, “Well?”

“Oh, how united we are!” she exulted, and then she swooped down the steps to him.  “What is it?” she cried.

“It’s war,” he said, and he pulled her up to him and kissed her.

She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat.  “How glorious!”

“It’s war,” he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at first.  She never knew what to think of him; that made his mystery, his charm.  All through their courtship, which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it.  He seemed to despise it even more than he abhorred it.  She could have understood his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed and took up the law.  But making light of a cause so high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being.  Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself.  Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him.  In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that.  He sank down on the top step, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her question of the origin and authenticity of his news.