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 unseeing eyes. His mind busy with terrible regrets, he had forgotten his hatreds.

"I didn't even get a chance to tell her what a blind fool I'd been—that I was mostly to blame for the whole horrid mess and that—" With a weary shake of his head he left the sentence unfinished.

In the breathing silence there came up to the window a vast, faint shouting from the streets below. The doctor stepped to the casement and looked down into the Circle. Crowds were knotted on the corners, with newsboys weaving in and out among them and selling papers so rapidly that rather than any necessities of salesmanship, it must have been the urge of some profound excitement which kept their voices barking in such hoarse, persistent chorus.

"What's it all about, I wonder!" commented the doctor, thinking to divert George for a minute from his misery.

"Oh!" recalled the half-stupefied man, rousing. "You know what the headlines say? War!" His pronunciation of the word was almost incredulous. "Germany has invaded Belgium on the way to France. Russia is attacking Germany."

"My God!" breathed the doctor slowly, his eyes fixed on his informant, while one by one the wide horizons of his mind lighted up with the possibilities of such a conflagration among the