vernacular, he was as healthy as an ox, and the town drunkard was rising eighty.

Mrs. Balfame's friend, Dr. Anna Steuer, was now[Pg 12] replying to the lady from New York. After reminding the Club that the President of the United States had requested his docile subjects to curb their passions and flaunt their neutrality, Dr. Steuer proceeded to demolish the anti-German attitude of the guests by reciting the long list of industrial, economic and scientific contributions to civilisation which had distinguished the German Empire since the federation of its states.

[Pg 12]

Dr. Steuer was of Dutch descent, and her gifts were not forensic, but the key-note of her character was an intense and passionate loyalty. She had spent some of the most impressionable years of her life in the German clinics, and she cherished a romantic affection for a country whose natural and historic beauties no man will deny. She had steadfastly refused to read the "other side," pinning her faith to all that was best in the country of her youthful dreams. In consequence, her discourse, while informing, was somewhat beside the point; and had it not been for the deep love borne her by almost every one present, there would have been a polite but firm demand to give place.

Mrs. Balfame was smiling encouragement when her musings took a sudden and arbitrary twist. Being a person who never acted on impulse, her decisions, after due processes of thought, were commonly irrevocable. The moment she had made up her mind to pass her husband on, she had committed herself to the act; and, even before Dr. Anna Steuer had claimed her superficial attention, had already erected the question, How?

Mrs. Balfame was a woman who rarely bungled anything, and murder, she well knew, was the last of all[Pg 13] acts to bungle, did the perpetrator desire to enjoy the freedom of his act. Being refined to her marrow, she shrank from all forms of brutality, and rarely, if ever, read the details of crime in the newspapers. The sight of blood disgusted her, although it did not turn her faint. She kept a pistol in her bedroom; burglars, particularly of late, had entered a large number of houses in Brabant County; but nothing would have horrified her more than to empty its contents into the worst of criminals.

[Pg 13]

Mechanically she had run through the list of all the accepted forms of removing human impedimenta and rejected them, when Dr. Anna's scientific mind, playing along the surface of hers, shot in the arrow of suggestion that 

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