news of the murder of the Grand Duke had come, Nikola had been terribly cast down. “If our people did it,” he said, “it was a mistake.” Every line of news from that day he had discussed with Dick. He had believed from the first that Austria intended now to use all her power to crush Serbia; and “Germany will help her,” he used to say. The practical acceptance of Austria’s ultimatum had given Dick hope in the situation. It did not seem possible to him that any country, however autocratic and greedy, could push demand beyond the point which the Serbians had accepted.

Dick had other friends. There was the Greek, John A. Papalagos, as the sign on his flourishing fruit and vegetable store had it. People smiled at the time they knew that the Parson spent with the fruit seller. What they did not realize was that this man with his queer name was probably as well read as any man of the town, certainly far better read in European affairs than any of the leading citizens of Sabinsport. His ambition was a Greek republic, and every move on the European political checker-board he watched with excited and intelligent interest, calculating how it was going to deter or forward the one ardent passion of his life.

As a matter of fact it was only with Papalagos and the Serbians on the hill that Dick was able to carry on any really intelligent exchange of views on European politics. Ralph, who ought to have been, he felt, his comrade in these matters, had practically no interest in them. This indifference always puzzled and dismayed Dick. European politics, in Ralph’s opinion, were as unrelated to the United States as the politics of Mars. One feature only he treated with interest, and that was Germany’s social work. The forms of social insurance she had devised interested him keenly. He had regularly written enthusiastic editorials on the way she met the breaking down of men through age, illness, accident. Her handling of employment was one of his stock subjects. Germany was socially efficient in his mind, preserving men power, “as well as machines and hogs,” as he put it in the phrase of his school. He pictured her as a land where every man and woman was well housed, continuously employed, cared for in sickness or in health, and that was all Ralph knew about Germany. When Dick, who had tramped the land from end to end, put in a protest and mentioned the army as the end of all this care of human beings, Ralph broke out in a violent defense of the military system. It was merely a way of training men physically and arousing in them social solidarity. A nation couldn’t do what Germany did for men and women unless she loved them. It was what the United States needed.

Outside of these devices for meeting the breaking down of human beings, Ralph took no interest in Europe. His attitude through the Balkan War had baffled Dick by its perfunctoriness. He published the news as it came to him daily. He kept the maps on his walls, and now and then he wrote a few correct paragraphs, noting the change in situation. He was pleased that the power of Turkey was limited at the end, for he did have a hazy notion of the undesirableness of Turkey in Europe, but beyond this there was neither feeling nor understanding.

How, Dick asked himself, could a man of Ralph’s ability spend four years in a first-class American college and two on a great newspaper and still be so completely cut off from the affairs of the globe outside of the United States? It was a fact, but Dick could not understand how it could be a fact. It gave him his first real sense of the newness of the country, its entire absorption in itself.

Ralph defended this indifference. “They’re nothing to us,” he declared. “We’re too busy taking care of their scrap heaps. A million a year coming here to be reconstructed and Americanized, why should we bother about what Europe thinks or does? We’re too busy. They can’t touch us.”

As Dick walked out to the “Emma” that night after supper, he felt keenly his isolation. His mind was full of dread. Europe and her affairs had long been like a chess-board to him. For years with his fellows at Oxford, with Times correspondents in different continental cities, with a host of scattered acquaintances of various points of view, he had played the fascinating game of speculation and forecast that traps every student of history and politics who in the last forty years has spent any length of time in any great continental center. Dick knew something of the ambitions of every nation in Europe, something of their temper and their antipathies. He had in mind all possible lineups. He knew as well as any European statesman that if Austria declared war on Serbia, there would probably be Russian interference, and if Russia went in—“My God,” he groaned to himself, “Der Tag is here at last. It’s the ‘nächste Krieg.’”

He tried hard, as he walked, to push away the depression which was overwhelming him. “Of course, they’ll stop it,” he told himself; “they have before. It is folly for me to let this thing get hold of me in this way.”

It was twilight when he crossed the fields to the mining settlement and made for the house of his friend Nikola Petrovitch. In the dim light the little house looked very pleasant. Stana Petrovitch loved her garden, and the severe outlines of the company house were softened with blossoming honeysuckle, which filled the air with a faint perfume. It was very sweet to see, but before Dick was near enough to get more than a pleasant outline, from the house there came a burst of strong, fierce song—a dozen voices, eloquent with emotion. How well he knew it! The Serbian National Anthem: