step in the development of the Little Entente an advance to a full and complete Danube Confederation? This would be delayed if the Germans were let cut the Danube at Vienna by acquiring the new Austria, and that delay would menace the peace of Europe.

Many Americans impatiently exclaim: "Why are not Austria and Hungary taken into the Entente by the three other Succession States so that the Danube economic confederation, so obviously needed by all of them, can become an accomplished fact?" But those Americans have not spent much or perhaps any time in that quarter of the world, or they would know that the virus of Self-Determination has not had time to lose its poison-to work itself down to a harmless condi

tion.

Patience is urgently needed by the statesmen of Central Europe-like the steady flow of the Danube, constantly teaching the value of interdependence to the peoples it connects and serves. Fortunately for a world desiring ultimate stability, men like Masaryk and Benes of Czecho-Slovakia, Horthy and Bethlen of Hungary, and Pachich of South Slavia have both the understanding and the temperament to value patience. The impatient American must not forget that such phrases as a "Danube customs

union," "no custom-houses," "economic confederation," etc., are "fighting words" to races who remember that it was upon just these very shibboleths that the old Hapsburg tyranny was step by step built up.

Just as steadily and as certainly as the Danube swings its useful way through and around all those peoples will they in God's good time come to realize their need of closer economic relations. Perhaps it will be a sort of United States of the Danube. But equally certainly would any attempt to rush such a move delay a consummation so "devoutly to be wished."

Whether one looks down upon that ancient river from Bratislava's height, from Vienna's many bridges, from Buda's palace-crowned bluff, from Kalamegdan's park and fortress at Belgrade, or from the Iron Gates where Roumania stands guard, always and ever the low soft voice of the historic stream whispers "Patience."

There must be patiently awaited that current of public opinion, sooner or later seeking betterment of human conditions as certainly as the river seeks the sea. To struggle against that current is as futile as to attempt reversing the Danube's flow. Patience will bring back the old interdependence as surely as the Danube is, always has been, and always will be its invaluable servant.

H

EMPFIELD is a town of perhaps ten thousand people, situated so close to a great city that the necessity for separate industrial activity has never developed. It was a lovely old town thirty years ago. Much of its charm remains to-day in spite of Cosey Tea-Rooms, filling-stations of depraved Greek architecture, and Silver Creek Inns arising from the dust of the motor traffic and-pray God-to be returned some bright morning to the same indifferent dust.

The streets where I walked as a boy have not altered greatly. The blue dusk drops through the same enormous elms and horse-chestnut trees. In spring the little yellow buds fall upon the mellow brick walks; in autumn small fires of leaves smoulder in the dry dirt of the gutters. Ancient beauties linger in houses wearing the brass name-plates of old families. Only here and there where a family has passed forever from the roster of the town have the generous dwellings been subdivided into modern apartments, and even these retain something of that past spaciousness, hospitality, ease.

There is decay, I know, beneath the webs of ivy, but it is not too apparent. My eyes note few outward changes. Even the young people passing with a murmur of speech in the odorous dark of midsummer are not total strangers; they bear familiar names; in their faces I can find faintly reflected the features of the friends of my generation; in their voices, their gestures, are reborn the people who have become old with the long wear of years. We differ, these boys and girls and I, in many things, but completely in one

thing. None of them know, I am sure, the story of Helen Ortend and Rodger Canby.

...

They are both dead; a decade now. On the hill to the east of the town is the art gallery built and maintained with Rodger's fortune. Its perfect façade can be seen from almost any street and at sundown the windows flare brighter than the first stars.

The Ortend house, erected in 1784, of stone and plaster, I bought several years ago. To-day the jonquils bloomed in the garden. I ate breakfast in the tiny room where Helen breakfasted so many solitary mornings, and gazed over the gray edge of my newspaper at their gold margin.

I think about those two, Helen and Rodger, a great deal and have reconstructed something of the twenty years in which their 'absurd, tragic drama occurred, and of the time preceding, the history of their families and the irrelevant factors joining to produce the ultimate disaster.

Both were only children. Their homes stood on opposite sides of the same block. The Ortends were among the oldest families in Hempfield, antedating the Canbys by nearly a quarter-century. They had been at one time quite wealthy, but most of the money was lost through patriotic injudicious loans during the Civil War. None of the men who followed had been able to prosper. The heritage their children received was beauty, dignity, repose. The women the Ortend men married were lovely, their children handsome.

The Canbys rose in the financial scale as the Ortends dwindled. They were energetic, robust, violent-tempered, likable, but there were queer outcroppings of character-Rodger's great-grandfather, for instance. Rodger's father was worth several hundreds of thousands, possibly half a million. The Canbys and Ortends

were the closest friends and often agreed that a sympathetic providence had given them respectively a boy and a girl to permit a union of the two houses.

Rodger and Helen grew up with this tapestry of intention already woven as a background to their future. They ac cepted this situation willingly, at least as soon as they were old enough to understand and be interested in the plans of their parents. Helen's father died when she was fourteen, but this seemed only to strengthen the idea.

Helen was a shy, exquisite girl. Her Dutch blood had given her the wide, low brows, light eyes, pale-yellow hair, and rather square, grave face. Tall and slightly anæmic, she had gracious manners, little slow, characteristic gestures with her hands, a delicate elegance of speech and thought. I remember she never passed through the period of gauche rie, like the other girls I knew. She had an instinctive desire for all in life that is serene, charming, dispassionate. Perhaps I should not say instinctive, for this tranquillity, this calm detachment, was a trait of all the women in her family, although with Helen it had no root in any thing substantial; it was loosed from reality.

Never strong, she remained always a little apart from us. We admired her, but our admiration was clouded with awe, uncertainty. Her frail health made her timid. She became more and more a recluse, until at twenty she spent most of her days with her books-which were, like her, restful, languid, misted with dreams or in the walled garden with her beloved flowers. Rodger was the only boy who had ever approached her completely at his ease. But no one disconcerted Rodger-and there was the fact of their contemplated marriage.

Her withdrawal had blurred the actual outlines of her character in a romantic light resulting almost in a legend. She became an intriguing figure, fragrant with mystery, separated from our normal, hobbledehoy existence of school, parties, dances, tempestuous young love-affairs; the happiness and unhappiness of those years of our teens. Her beauty was intensified, as remote cities and dead queens gather about them the additional fascina

tion of distance. She was an ivory girl, provocative, alluring, unattainable. Half the young men of the town were secretly in love with her. ... Yes, and I was in love with her.

II

THE phrase coming most often to my mind in connection with Rodger Canby is "fortune's darling." I know it is hackneyed and not permitted even in the unexclusive circles of the newspapers, but it has still a certain grace which makes it seem coined for this particular use. He was a tall, dark boy, not at all swarthy; a clear sort of darkness such as we associate with the finest Italian type. His hair was black, his eyes a deep brown with extraordinarily long lashes. He had a haughty nose, a sharp masculine jaw. Only his mouth did not harmonize with the aristocratic face. It was well shaped, but the lips were too heavy, the lower lip a trifle pendulous and very red; the blood appeared about to burst the thin tissue. Most girls admired his too red mouth.

When he was quite young he had displayed an aptitude for music; more than that, a distinct talent. This desire was cultivated by his mother and directed by the best teachers. He made remarkable progress. At nineteen he could play the violin, piano, and organ. His voice was full and pleasant, and he enjoyed singing. He had written a few compositionswaltzes, gavottes, haunting dance music with sensuous under-rhythms. They were dedicated to Helen Ortend, printed for private distribution, and created some excitement. The Canby and Ortend families decided his music was worthy of a postponement of the wedding. His parents proposed he should go to Germany for several years and finish his training. At that period no American could begin an artistic career without the credentials of a foreign education. Helen agreed, of course, to the scheme. Apparently there was no change in their attitudes toward each other, but I am sure there was a fluctuation in the undercurrents of their lives.

Helen loved Rodger with bewildering intensity. He never wearied her. Gradually all her ideas were directed to him,

merged into his personality until she no longer recognized them. Her vague desires concentrated, as a lens focusses the sun, into her love of him, burned upon her heart. . . . How should I know? I was the only other young man who saw her. I was her brother, almost. Living with aunt and uncle, my parents dead, Helen's mother was my mother. I came and went as I chose. . ..

Before Rodger sailed the engagement

was announced. The dinner was Helen's last appearance at a social function; after that night the walls of her garden were the horizons of the universe. Had her father lived this might not have happened, but Mrs. Ortend, herself a solitary woman, still mourning the man she had loved, always acceded to Helen's desires. At the dinner Helen sat quiet and remote, luminous beside the dark grace of her fiancé. A little smile turned the