There was a hush in the peaceful, firelit, lamp-lit room.  And with that, as of one impulse, led by the Senator, the five men broke into handclapping.  Tears stood in eyes, faces were twisted with emotion; each of these men had seen what the thing was—­war; each knew what a price humanity had paid for freedom.  Out of the stirring of emotion, out of the visions of trenches and charges and blood and agony and heroism and unselfishness and steadfastness, the fighting parson, he who had bent, under fire, many a day over dying men who waited his voice to help them across the border—­the parson led the little company from the intense moment to commonplace.

“You haven’t quite finished the story, General.  The boy promised to do two things.  He did the first; he gave the Judge ’something more than a dollar,’ and the Judge took it—­his life.  But he said also he was going to marry—­what did he call her?—­Miss Angel.  How about that?”

The Russian General, standing on the hearthrug, appeared to draw himself up suddenly with an access of dignity, and the Judge’s boyish big laugh broke into the silence, “Tell them, Michael,” said the Judge.  “You’ve gone so far with the fairy story that they have a right to know the crowning glory of it.  Tell them.”

And suddenly the men sitting about noticed with one accord what, listening to the General’s voice, they had not thought about—­that the Russian was uncommonly tall—­six feet four perhaps; that his face was carved in sweeping lines like a granite hillside, and that an old, long scar stretched from the vivid eyes to the mouth.  The men stared, startled with a sudden simultaneous thought.  The Judge, watching, smiled.  Slowly the General put his hand into the breast pocket of his evening coat; slowly he drew out a case of dark leather, tooled wonderfully, set with stones.  He opened the case and looked down; the strong face changed as if a breeze and sunshine passed over a mountain.  He glanced up at the men waiting.

“I am no Duke’s brother,” he said, smiling, suddenly radiant.  “That is a mistake of the likeness of a name, which all the world makes.  I am born a mujik of Russia.  But you, sir,” and he turned to the parson, “you wish an answer of ‘Miss Angel,’ as the big peasant boy called that lovely spirit, so far above him in that night, so far above him still, and yet, God be thanked, so close today!  Yes?  Then this is my answer.”  He held out the miniature set with jewels.

ROBINA’S DOLL

Massive, sprawling, uncertain writing, two sentences to the page; a violent slant in the second line, down right, balanced by a drastic lessening of the letters, up right, in the line underneath; spelling not as advised in the Century Dictionary—­a letter from Robina, aged eight.  Robina’s Aunt Evelyn, sitting in her dress and cap of a Red Cross nurse in the big base hospital in Paris, read the wandering, painstaking, very unsuccessful literary effort, laughing, half-crying, and kissed it enthusiastically.